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THE EXPERIENCE OP GOD 
IN MODERN LIFE 



THE 

EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

IN MODERN LIFE 



BY 
EUGENE WILLIAM LYMAN, D.D. 

PBOFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OP RELIGION AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS 

OBERLIN GRADUATE SCHOOL OP THEOLOGY 

AUTHOR OP "THEOLOGY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS" AND 

"THE GOD OP THE NEW AGE" 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK * * * * 1918 



■x- 



Copyright, 1918, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published April, 1918 



MAY 23 1918 




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TO 

THE FACULTY OF THE 

OBERLIN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY 

IN GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION 



PREFACE 

This book consists of lectures delivered 
last autumn at Union Theological Semi- 
nary. The subject discussed is much more 
difficult than it was when it first occurred 
to me several years ago, but it is corre- 
spondingly more important. There should 
be no moratorium for theological and re- 
ligious thinking during the period of the 
war. The relation of such thinking to the 
morale of the forces of the Kingdom of 
God is too vital for that. We should not 
expect valor without vision, nor steadfast- 
ness without faith. The democracy, social 
and world-wide, which so many of us in- 
creasingly feel to be our true and only hope 
is itself a matter of religion, and religion 
can fulfil its mission only as it issues in 
such a democracy; but this reciprocal re- 
lation will not be clearly grasped without 
the aid of earnest thinking. It was, ac- 
cordingly, with the hope of making some 
slight contribution toward meeting our 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

present spiritual emergency that the argu- 
ment of the following chapters was worked 
out. 

For helpful criticism and counsel I wish 
to express my especial thanks to my col- 
league, Professor William J. Hutchins. 

Eugene W. Lyman. 

Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, 
March 29, 1918. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction 1 

CHAPTER 

I. The Experience of God and the Devel- 
opment of Personality 8 

II. The Experience of God and Social Prog- 
ress 51 

III. The Experience of God and Cosmic 

Evolution 101 



Index 153 



THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 
IN MODERN LIFE 

INTRODUCTION 

The modern world is in quest, dumbly 
and half-consciously, of a religion. That 
is, it is moving out toward a new adjust- 
ment to reality, human and cosmic, and 
toward a new appropriation of ideals, 
which when accomplished will be funda- 
mental, comprehensive, spiritual, and so 
essentially religious; and of this move- 
ment it is growingly aware. The old atoms 
of our thought, supposed to be indivisible 
and unchangeable, are breaking up, but 
the new ions which shall resolve some of 
the deadlocks in our thinking have not 
been surely discovered. The old empirical 
medicine by which we used to poultice the 
social order is thoroughly discredited, but 
the new antisepsis and -hygiene which shall 
secure vigorous social health and growth 
are only in their beginnings and are regarded 
in many quarters with superstitious fear. 



2 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

Even the written constitutions of the eccle- 
siastical world sometimes experience a cer- 
tain strain, though none of the supreme 
courts that interpret them have frankly 
followed the example of our national su- 
preme court and adopted the "rule of rea- 
son." Of the radical character and the 
extent of these changes not a few minds 
were beginning to take some account be- 
fore the World War, but with the progress 
of the war they are more and more com- 
ing home to the minds of people at large. 
We do not expect to emerge from this 
war with the same intellectual, social, and 
spiritual systems that we had when we en- 
tered upon it. We know that the war is 
bound to be followed by a new world, vastly 
different — whether for better or worse — 
from the old. Times of such tremendous 
change men instinctively feel are in a 
peculiar sense times for religion. And so 
they are asking: "What religion shall we, 
and can we, have ?" It will be our purpose 
in the following discussions to try to do 
something toward answering this question. 
The first aspect of our question — "What 
religion shall we have?" — turns partly 
upon what modern life most urgently needs, 



IN MODERN LIFE 3 

and partly upon what religion has to offer 
that meets those needs; and the second 
aspect of our question — "What religion 
can we have?" — turns upon the relation 
of these central modern meanings of re- 
ligion to reality as a whole. These turning- 
points, therefore, may well furnish the 
orientation by which the course of our 
thought is determined. 

If one flings out a general inquiry as to 
what modern life needs from religion he is 
likely to provoke a multitude of divergent 
and contradictory answers, ranging all the 
way from "Nothing" to "Everything." 
But in these days of world convulsion the 
modest and respectful attitude on the part 
of contrasting groups of thought is the only 
commendable one. No one of them has 
any very good claim to be self-sufficient — 
able to say to any of the others: "I have 
no need of thee." It is a time for coalition 
cabinets in the realm of social philosophy. 
And in fact modern life is far from feeling 
itself to be self-sufficient as regards religion. 
On the contrary it is peculiarly plastic to 
such influence, provided religion will speak 
straight to its deepest needs. 

So, too, the determining of what religion 



4 THE EXPERIENCE OP, GOD 

has to offer to meet modern needs cannot be 
done in an arbitrary and dogmatic spirit. 
Religion, in view of the present moral re- 
lapse in the civilized world, is having to 
refund many of its most valuable assets 
with long-time promises, to keep which at 
their par value will tax its utmost energies. 
The "note of authority " so often demanded 
of religious teachers must reduce itself to 
the open-minded sincerity of a religion that 
seeks to be the servant of life. The world 
situation, then, sets aside all assumption 
of self-sufficiency on the part of modern 
life, and of dogmatic authority on the part 
of religion, and challenges them to mutual 
co-operation. 

At what points, if anywhere, may we 
expect this co-operation to be most real 
and successful ? A detailed and exhaustive 
analysis of modern needs is obviously be- 
yond the scope of the task of these three 
lectures. We can only select certain needs 
which are clearly vital and comprehensive, 
and with which all others are likely to prove 
more or less directly bound up, doing some- 
thing to justify the selection as we proceed. 
Let me suggest, then, that modern life 
needs aid from religion in three great tasks : 



EST MODERN LIFE 5 

the development of personality, the pro- 
motion of social progress, and the inter- 
pretation of cosmic evolution. 

But in what form, in turn, may we most 
hopefully look for the co-operative action 
of religion in respect to these tasks ? Here 
the whole wide field of the psychology and 
history of religion stretches out before us, 
and here again we must select. Let the 
present-day emphasis upon religious ex- 
perience be our clew, and in order that we 
may be dealing with that which is unmis- 
takably religion let us take the experience 
of God as a conception which is broadly 
inclusive of what religion has to bring to 
the great tasks of modern life. This selec- 
tion, however, I hasten to add, is made 
merely in order to delimit a field of inquiry, 
and with the express intention of not 
drifting into the dogmatic attitude already 
condemned. It involves on the one hand 
no denial of the possibility of a religious 
experience without an experience of God, 
and on the other hand no assumption as 
to the nature or validity of the experience 
of God. These are matters which must not 
be prejudged, for they are themselves sub- 
jects of our inquiry. Here at the outset of 



6 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

our discussion, then, we mean by the ex- 
perience of God simply that which in their 
own personal lives men feel or think of as 
such an experience. Thus our question, 
"What religion shall, and can, the modern 
world have?" when more fully stated, be- 
comes an inquiry into the meaning, value, 
and reality of the experience of God in 
modern life. 

Under this general topic the three great 
needs which we have said were fundamental 
for the modern world give us the themes 
for our three discussions. They are: "The 
Experience of God and the Development of 
Personality," "The Experience of God and 
Social Progress," and "The Experience of 
God and Cosmic Evolution." And in this 
statement of our themes is involved the 
scientific method which will be governing 
our inquiry and which should be pointed 
out here. We are not bringing the experi- 
ence of God as men feel or believe them- 
selves to have it, in all its heterogeneous- 
ness, to modern life, with the insistence 
that it all be found valuable. Nor are we 
assuming that modern life furnishes the 
final framework to which religion must 
be ruthlessly pruned. We are simply seek- 



IN MODERN LIFE 7 

ing for certain significant points where the 
experience of God and modern life are 
capable of interacting with each other with 
mutual quickening effect. In other words, 
we shall not take final norms from religion 
to impose upon modern life, nor final norms 
from modern life to impose upon religion; 
but out of the vital conjunction of the two 
we shall hope to obtain certain working 
principles which are of importance for the 
growth of the human spirit. This would 
seem to be the legitimate meaning of the 
empirical method in an evolutionary world. 
We are, accordingly, to consider the ex- 
perience of God in its relation to modern 
life from three points of view — the per- 
sonal, the social, and the cosmic. 



THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND THE 
DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 

We turn, then, to the immediate theme 
of the hour: the experience of God and 
the development of personality. The jus- 
tification already promised for the selec- 
tion of the development of personality as a 
fundamental modern need is in one sense 
hardly necessary. Personality is certainly 
one of the great words of the present, a 
word to conjure by even with the popular 
mind. But perhaps for this very reason 
it is in danger of degenerating to a merely 
superficial use. An advertisement in The 
New Republic reads as follows: "Build up 
your personality. It is your greatest social, 
professional, and business asset. Other 
persons may successfully copy your busi- 
ness and social methods but no one can 
copy your personality. Become a per- 
sonality. Our correspondence course will 
teach you how. Write for particulars. 5 ' 
Fortunately this advertisement comes not 
from the school of religion on 120th Street, 



THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 9 

but from an institution on 12th Street. 
For no correspondence course will teach one 
how to become a personality. The word 
has acquired a depth and a range that 
cannot be lightly passed over. Into it and 
its equivalent have been put the highest 
dreams of the race. Lotze has given us 
the conception of personality as an infinite 
ideal toward which man may indefinitely 
approach. Nietzsche has struck out for 
us the idea of the Superman, which among 
other meanings suggests to us that there 
are ranges of personality entirely beyond 
our present horizon. Democratic thought 
presents the ideal of a genuine personality 
for every human individual. And Chris- 
tianity, with its conceptions of freedom, 
service, and immortality, has brought the 
essential features of these dreams into a 
living union the fruitfulness of which we 
may well believe is far from being ex- 
hausted yet. 

But notwithstanding the possession of 
these great dreams and all they have done 
for us, the development of personality 
confronts us as our most urgent and per- 
plexing task. For our other development 
has outstripped the development of per- 



10 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

sonality. Science has had a swift develop- 
ment, but conscience has by no means kept 
pace with it. Yet only the harmonious 
interaction of science and conscience can 
bring forth true personality. Production 
has expanded enormously, while education 
has progressed but moderately. Yet only 
as production and education keep step can 
vigorous personalities be built up. The 
diffusion of ideas has reached a high de- 
gree of perfection, but the ideas diffused 
are often cheap and thin; the means of 
enjoyment are at the disposal of all, but 
the power wisely to enjoy is at the command 
of but few. Yet only as intelligence and 
taste interpenetrate with information and 
entertainment can sane and elastic persons 
result. And so it has come to pass that, 
even in the free republics in which the 
opportunities of life are most widely shared, 
the opportunity to be a personality is 
denied to whole classes; and while the 
technique of controlling physical things 
forges ahead, the art of developing per- 
sonalities lags behind. And at the present 
crisis it often seems as though our entire 
civilization were nothing but a wrecked 
airship, with the personalities supposed to 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 11 

be most especially in control helplessly 
entangled in the wreckage. 

If, then, the task of developing per- 
sonality is one whose fundamental urgency 
for modern life can hardly be denied, what 
aid for its accomplishment can be looked 
for from the experience of God ? We shall 
consider first the meaning and value of 
such experience for this task, and then its 
reality or validity. 



Much experience of God, as men have 
felt or believed themselves to have it, has 
had — it must be confessed at the outset — 
quite other aims than the development of 
personality. This is indeed true on the 
whole of the great non-Christian religions 
of the present, except that form of Judaism 
which stands close to Christianity. And in 
the Christian religion itself the conscious 
aim has often been indifferent or hostile to 
the development of personality. Never- 
theless I think it can be shown that the 
experience of God has proven itself capable 
of being a powerful force to this end, so that 
in Christianity at least it is coming more 
and more to have this end as one of its chief 



12 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

conscious aims. We shall look to the 
Hebrew and Christian religions as the most 
hopeful sources of evidence that such is 
indeed the fact. 

The most unique personal experiences 
of God in the Hebrew religion are those of 
the great prophets; and with the rebirth of 
prophecy at the beginning of Christianity 
the most characteristic personal religious 
experience is that of sonship to God. Now 
the significance of these types of experience 
for personal development is that they lift 
those who have them to the level of crea- 
tive moral living. Amos, the herdsman and 
dresser of sycamore-trees, is transformed by 
his sense of the will of God into a preacher 
of social justice, a believer in international- 
ism from the ethical and religious stand- 
point, if not from the political, and a 
foremost teacher of ethical monotheism. 
Hosea, the victim of cruel domestic tragedy, 
is made by his sense of God's faithfulness 
into an interpreter of divine redemptive 
love for his nation. Isaiah, the courtier, 
is through his profound experience of God 
also the righteous statesman and the typi- 
cal seer of his race. Jeremiah, the priest's 
son, becomes, through the burning fire 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 13 

shut up in his bones, the one who detaches 
the faith in Jehovah from the temple and 
interprets it as an inward and personal 
religion. And though we have fewer bio- 
graphical data from other prophets, the 
messages they bring give evidence of a like 
transforming experience. Moral creativ- 
ity is clearly one of the most significant 
fruits of the prophetic consciousness. 

But a fuller evidence of the moral creat- 
iveness of the prophetic consciousness is 
its power to propagate itself. Anonymous 
prophecy doubtless means, on the whole, 
a decline of the prophetic spirit, but in one 
sense it means its triumph. For it shows 
that the prophetic experience can spread 
through a variety of minds — some of them 
perhaps lesser minds, but all capable of a 
first-hand experience of God. Just as the 
anonymous work in many of our great State 
documents proves that statesmanship is a 
co-operative matter, so anonymous proph- 
ecy proves that the prophetic conscious- 
ness is more widely sharable than we some- 
times have supposed. And with the great 
anonymous prophet of the exile comes the 
conception of Israel as a prophet nation. 
Thus the prophet's divine call was extended 



14 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

to any that had ears to hear; and that this 
call was apprehended and responded to by 
many, to be sure with varying degrees of 
clarity and vigor, is proven by the vitality 
of Jewish religious literature, whether in 
the form of prophecy, or apocalypse, or 
psalm, or gnomic poem. 

While, however, the prophetic experience 
of God with its moral creativity persisted 
long through the clash of civilizations and 
the havoc of war, it gradually declined. 
Yet even in its decline it was vital enough 
to engender something greater than itself. 
With Jesus came a profoundly new experi- 
ence of God and at the same time a won- 
derful new appreciation of human values 
and power to give those values vital embodi- 
ment. This new and greater form of proph- 
ecy expresses itself under the conscious- 
ness of sonship to God. And the outstand- 
ing characteristic of this consciousness of 
sonship is its union of an experience of God 
of new intimacy and depth with a moral 
creativity of the greatest scope and energy. 
This new religious and moral life of course 
makes use of many contemporary forms of 
thought, historical, psychological, theologi- 
cal — as for example the Messianic eschatol- 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 15 

ogy — at the same time that it is bursting 
and abandoning other contemporary forms. 
And perhaps the attempt to distinguish 
between essence and form, with the idea 
that the essence is authoritative though the 
form is not, is a dubious one. But our 
point is simply this: that here at the be- 
ginning of Christianity is a spiritual process 
from which can be learned things of most 
vital moment for modern life. In Jesus' 
consciousness of sonship we see the ex- 
perience of God making powerfully for the 
development of personality because it is 
so intimately united with moral creativity; 
and if the development of personality is a 
fundamental and permanent modern task, 
Jesus' consciousness of sonship may well re- 
tain for us the utmost significance. 

This consciousness of sonship proved 
able to propagate itself with even greater 
vitality than the older prophetic conscious- 
ness. And this propagation is evidently the 
direct intention of Jesus. Indeed, he sets 
no limit to the extent to which he seeks to 
share his filial experience with others. 
Men are to become sons of God even to 
the extent of sharing in the great redemp- 
tive experience of love for one's enemies. 



16 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

They are to become sons even to the ex- 
tent of those words which President Mc- 
Giffert has somewhere called the bravest 
that man ever spoke: "Ye therefore shall 
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is per- 
fect." Here is limitless development of 
personality combined with the deepest ex- 
perience of God, and it is hard to imagine 
how either could have come to pass with- 
out the other. For it is the sharing of 
the mind of the Father which gives the 
moral creativity, and without the moral 
creativity the mind of the Father is not 
really shared. 

That the early Christians responded 
widely to Jesus's teaching and example 
of sonship the great New Testament writ- 
ers make plain. From Paul we learn that 
the key-note of the early Christian's prayer 
was "Abba, Father "; and he himself inter- 
prets Christian conversion as adoption into 
sonship, and declares that: "As many as 
are led by the spirit of God, these are sons 
of God." With Paul, too, as with Jesus, 
this sonship means the union of freedom 
and service — the freedom which can be 
realized only in service, and the service 
which can be accomplished only by free 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 17 

men. Or, in the terms that we have been 
using, this experience of sonship to God 
means moral creativity. John likewise is 
interpreting essentially the same experience 
in those great sayings: "As many as re- 
ceived him, to them gave he the right to 
become children of God"; and, "Behold 
what manner of love the Father hath be- 
stowed upon us, that we should be called 
children of God; and such we are." And 
the meaning for the development of per- 
sonality is again essentially the same — 
purifying the self, walking in the light, do- 
ing the works of God. 

All too soon, it is true, the Christian ex- 
perience of God ceased to be a conscious- 
ness of sonship. And one can hardly help 
thinking that with this change went a loss 
of moral creativity. Indeed, one of the 
important reasons for believing that Chris- 
tianity has great development still ahead 
is that Christians are beginning to recover 
this consciousness of sonship in its deeper 
religious and moral meanings and without 
the traditional theological limitations which 
have resulted from marking a metaphysical 
boundary line between the sonship of Jesus 
and that of other men. At all events the 



18 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

Christian experience of God has expressed 
itself chiefly in other ways and has had for 
the development of personality very vari- 
ous results. 

But we have not undertaken the task, 
so utterly impossible at this time at least, 
of indicating all that the experience of God, 
even the Christian, may have meant for 
or against the development of personality. 
We are simply seeking evidence that the 
experience of God is capable of having 
great positive significance for such develop- 
ment. And we shall have to limit ourselves 
to a few instances which have an added 
meaning because they are comparatively 
close to the present and have influenced 
our modern world in significant ways. 

One of the creative centres of American 
spiritual life is the personality of Horace 
Bushnell, and the inner explanation of 
this fact his biography shows to be his 
experience of God. Let me cite the most 
striking phase of that experience. "The 
year 1848," writes his wife — that is, when 
he was forty-six years old — "was the cen- 
tral point in the life of Horace Bushnell." 
"I believed," he himself said of the years 
just preceding, "that there is a higher, 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 19 

fuller life that can be lived, and set myself 
to attain it." Months of study and spiri- 
tual seeking ensued. " On an early morning 
in February/' his biography states, "his 
wife awoke, to hear that the light they had 
waited for, more than they that watch for 
the morning, had risen indeed. She asked, 
' What have you seen?' He replied, 'The 
Gospel/ It came to him at last, after all 
his thought and study, not as something 
reasoned out, but as an inspiration — a 
revelation from the mind of God himself." 
Looking back on this experience Bushnell 
said: "I seemed to pass a boundary. I 
had never been very legal in my Christian 
life, but now I passed from those partial 
seeings, glimpses and doubts, into a clearer 
knowledge of God and into his inspirations, 
which I have never wholly lost. The 
change was into faith — a sense of the free- 
ness of God and the ease of approach to 
him." And of the meaning of faith he else- 
where said: "It is not the committing of 
one's thought in assent to any proposition, 
but the trusting of one's being to a being, 
there to be rested, kept, guided, moulded, 
governed, and possessed forever." Of this 
experience his wife wrote: "The greatness 



20 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

of this change and its profound reality made 
him a new man, or rather the same man 
with a heavenly investiture/' 1 This judg- 
ment is borne out by the facts, for the 
greatest days of BushnelTs intellectual and 
spiritual productivity were still ahead of 
him. Of the power of this creative spiri- 
tual experience to propagate itself to others 
a single testimony must suffice. Doctor 
Washington Gladden has written of Bush- 
nell: "I could not have remained in the 
ministry, an honest man, if it had not been 
for him. ... If I have had any gospel to 
preach, during the last thirty-five years, 
it is because he led me into the light and 
joy of it." 2 

By the side of this instance of what the 
experience of God can mean for the de- 
velopment of personality let us place an- 
other, found in the life of one whose influ- 
ence in England was in many respects very 
similar to that of Bushnell in America. 
James Martineau was a remarkable in- 
carnation of that liberalism of which New- 
man was so fearful, but to which the 

1 Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell, by Mary Bushnell Cheney, 
pp. 191-3. 

2 Horace Bushnell : Preacher and Theologian, by T. T. Munger, 
p. 375. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 21 

greatness of England during the last cen- 
tury was so largely due. Particular phases 
of this movement no doubt found sharper 
and more consistent expression in other 
great intellectual and political liberals of 
England. But Martineau was in singu- 
larly close relation with all its groups, and 
in its many-sidedness and inward meaning 
he is perhaps its best single embodiment. 

What is the secret of this creative re- 
lation between Martineau and the spirit 
of England? We may venture to answer: 
his experience of God. The evidence of 
this, as with Bushnell, runs all through his 
biography, but no single experience con- 
centrates it, as in Bushnell's case, in a 
dramatic moment. It however has re- 
ceived a unique expression in that wonder- 
ful product of his early career, Endeavors 
after the Christian Life. Throughout these 
rich meditations the autobiographical note 
is unmistakable. I cite a single passage 
from the chapter entitled "The Besetting 
God." After speaking of God in nature 
throughout space and time he turns char- 
acteristically to the moral consciousness: 
"But there is a moral presence of his Spirit 
to our minds which places us in relations 



22 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

to him more intimate and sacred. Surely 
there occur to every uncorrupted heart 
some stirrings of a diviner life; some con- 
sciousness, obscure and transient it may 
be, but deep and authoritative, of a nobler 
calling than we have yet obeyed; a rooted 
dissatisfaction with self, a suspicion of some 
poison in the will, a helpless veneration for 
somewhat that is gazed at with a sigh as out 
of reach. It is the touch of God upon us; 
his heavy hand laid upon our conscience, 
and felt by all who are not numb with the 
paralytic twist of sin. Even the languid 
mind of self-indulgence, drowsy with too 
much sense, complacent with too much self, 
scarcely escapes the sacred warning. . . . 
And as for minds that are awake and in any 
wise in quest of him, he haunts them every 
way. that we could but know it to 
be false that the good man is satisfied from 
himself ! When was there ever one of us 
who did not feel his recollections full of 
shame and grief, and find in the past the 
cup that overflowed with tears? When 
one that did not look into the future with 
resolves made timid and anxious by the 
failures of experience, and distrust that 
breaks the high young courage of the heart, 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 23 

and prayers that in utterance half-expect 
refusal? Which of us can stand this day 
at the solemn meeting-point of past and 
future, without abasement for the one, and 
trembling for the other? — without being 
beset by the divine Spirit in penitent re- 
grets from behind, and in passionate aspira- 
tions from before? And herein we should 
discover only this : that he has laid his hand 
upon us; has resolved to claim us to the 
uttermost; and will haunt us with his re- 
bukes, though they wither us with sorrow, 
till we surrender without terms. " 

In such a passage as this the notable thing 
is the way in which the experience of God 
and that of moral renewal and creative 
power interpenetrate. And this, expressed 
with varying shades of feeling — now solemn 
and now glad — is the distinctive note of 
Martineau. For him goodness and God 
are so related that neither merely dissolves 
into the other and yet each is inseparable 
from the other. 

As a further instance of the relation be- 
tween the experience of God and moral 
creativity we may take the personality of 
Albrecht Ritschl. The moral creativity of 
Ritsehl was in one sense less, and in an- 



24 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

other greater, than that of Bushnell or of 
Martineau. He touched life on fewer sides 
than they, and he lacked their imaginative 
and literary power; but his work was more 
sharply concentrated about a few construc- 
tive ideas, and he became the centre of a 
large and fairly definite school of thought 
— which was hardly true of the other two 
men. This Ritschlian movement, coming 
at a time when both speculative idealism 
and pietism in Germany had largely spent 
their force, has had so important an in- 
fluence in ethicizing and socializing con- 
temporary religion, both in Germany and 
in other lands, that originality and creative 
energy can hardly be denied to its author. 

Ritschl was through and through a theo- 
logian. He was not the author of important 
devotional literature, and his biographer 
records no unique religious experiences. 
At first sight it might seem, therefore, as 
though he were merely the thinker about 
religion instead of the possessor of a first- 
hand experience of God. But a little 
closer examination of the matter makes 
plain that Ritschl was characterized by a 
religious experience of a singularly simple 
and rugged type. The most creative period 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 25 

of his life centres about the year 1874, when 
the second and third volumes of his Justi- 
fication and Reconciliation were published, 
and that same year he issued a pamphlet 
on Christian Perfection which is so succinct 
and comprehensive an interpretation of 
the Christian life as to furnish the clew for 
tracing his personal religion both in his 
biography and in his theological writings. 
What is this clew ? It is that the experience 
of God and the moral life stand in the most 
intimate reciprocal relation. Christian per- 
fection is the perfection of a finite and grow- 
ing life which at the same time attains 
wholeness of character after its kind. This 
wholeness of character is attainable as man 
on the one hand gains mastery over the 
world, and on the other loyally dedicates 
himself to his ethical vocation in the ser- 
vice of the Kingdom of God. How dis- 
tinctly ethical and social is RitschFs con- 
ception of the Kingdom of God becomes 
apparent from his characterization of it in 
the Justification and Reconciliation as "the 
organization of humanity through action 
inspired by love," and also from his further 
statement — we of the new century should 
note this carefully — that "it rises above the 



26 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

limits of nationality and becomes the moral 
society of nations." 1 Now this mastery 
over the world and this obedience to the 
principle of organizing human life through 
love are the very qualities which for 
Ritschl constitute the divinity of Jesus 
and the perfection of God himself. To 
be growing into them is to attain sonship 
to God, and the source of such growth is 
that relationship to God, in humility, faith, 
patience, and prayer, which we learn from 
the sonship of Jesus. 

Around such simple, vital ethical and 
religious ideas Ritschl organized not only 
his thinking but his personal life. Loyalty 
to one's ethical vocation and rugged in- 
dividuality mastering the conditions of 
life, under the sense of doing the will of 
God, are seldom better seen than in Ritschl. 
And if the humility which he declares to 
be the characteristic religious virtue often 
seems to be too little dominant in his life, 
this is partly because to him humility 
toward God means strenuous moral energy 
in conduct, and partly because — in reaction 
against pietistic pride in humility — he holds 
humility to be "the secret of the religious 

1 Justification and Reconciliation, pp. 10-12. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 27 

man with himself." 1 The psychology of 
religion which recognizes wide differences 
of temperament in religious experience will 
hardly deny the originality of Ritschl's 
experience of God, or its vital influence upon 
his personality and career. 

To the American Bushnell, the English 
Martineau, the German Ritschl let us add, 
as evidence of the positive relation between 
experience of God and the development of 
personality, the Russian Tolstoi. The lit- 
erary creativity of Tolstoi's earlier years 
does not explicitly connect itself with re- 
ligious experience, but the moral creativity 
of his middle life and later years has in such 
experience its vital roots. And though it 
would be fruitless to guess which phase of 
Tolstoi's genius the future will value the 
more highly, in the vast crisis of the pres- 
ent it is certain that the moral phase looms 
up with the greater significance. For Tol- 
stoi's teachings in their total influence are 
a powerful ferment for democracy. Note, 
for example, his challenge to the science 
of our day. Political economy he declares 
should deal with but one question: "What 
is the cause and purpose of some people 

1 Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, sec. 52. 



28 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

doing nothing and others working for 
them?" Historical science, too, should 
treat of only one question — "How the 
workers, that is nine hundred and ninety- 
nine thousandths of all mankind, lived?" 
So for jurisprudence the one essential ques- 
tion is: "Why do people exist who allow 
themselves to exercise violence toward other 
men, to rob, imprison, execute them, send 
them to wars, and much else?" Technical 
sciences should be directed solely to the 
end of "alleviating the labor of the people." 
Philosophy has but one problem to which 
it should address itself: "What am I to 
do?" 1 To be sure, political democracy 
was to his mind hardly more hopeful than 
any other form of the state. It was 
democracy based solely on universal re- 
ligion, with its universal law of brotherhood, 
in which he put his faith. Nevertheless 
his ideas, incarnated as they were in his 
self-identification with the life of the com- 
mon people in their toil, are proving a 
democratic yeast and are leavening society 
— and even the political institutions in 
which he disbelieved — in a startling and 
far-reaching way. 

1 What is Religion f pp. 28-31. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 29 

The religious experience which brought 
to birth the new moral creativity of Tol- 
stoi's later life he recounts in his Con- 
fession. "I felt," he writes, "that some- 
thing had broken within me on which my 
life had always rested, that I had nothing 
left to hold on to, and that morally my life 
had stopped." 

"Behold me then . . . hiding the rope in 
order not to hang myself to the rafters of 
the room where every night I went to sleep 
alone; behold me no longer going shooting, 
lest I should yield to the too easy temptation 
of putting an end to myself with my gun." 

"Then I turned my gaze upon myself, 
on what went on within me, and I remem- 
bered that I only lived at those times when 
I believed in God. As it was before, so it 
was now: I need only to be aware of God 
to live; I need only to forget him or dis- 
believe in him, to die. . . . "What more 
do you seek ? ' exclaimed a voice within me. 
'This is he. He is that without which one 
cannot live. To know God and to live is 
one and the same thing!' . . . And the 
light did not again abandon me." 

"I returned to belief in that Will which 
produced me, and desires something of me. 



30 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

I returned to the belief that the chief and 
only aim of my life is to be better, i. e., to 
live in accord with that Will. And I re- 
turned to the belief that I can find the ex- 
pression of that Will, in what humanity, in 
the distant past, hidden from me, has pro- 
duced for its guidance: that is to say, I 
returned to a belief in God, in moral per- 
fecting, and in a tradition transmitting the 
meaning of life." 1 

Thus the fact of the positive significance 
of the experience of God for the develop- 
ment of personality presents itself to us 
as being no less real in the modern world 
than in the distant times of the past. And 
it is a fact witnessed to not merely by a few 
isolated lives such as these four but by the 
self -propagating power of such experiences 
in other lives. Moral creativity passes 
from life to life and spreads out into social 
movements — just as the intellectual in- 
ventiveness of Edison or Marconi or the 
Wright brothers sets hundreds of others 
inventing and inaugurates a new age in the 
control of nature — and with moral creativity 
a consciousness of an experience of God is 
bound up. 

1 Aylmer Maude, Life of Tolstoi, vol. I, pp. 417-18. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 31 

But now there is one characteristic of the 
experience of God in the data before us 
which should be especially stressed if we 
are to realize the meaning of such experience 
for the development of personality. For, as 
we have already said, that which men feel 
or believe to be the experience of God may 
have quite other aims than that of develop- 
ing personality, and even quite other results. 

The characteristic referred to is the way 
in which, in the modes of religion that we 
are dealing with, the experience of God and 
that of moral creativity mutually pene- 
trate each other. God is felt or believed 
to be a present fact of the inner life in pro- 
portion as creative moral energy is rising 
and maintaining itself within. The marks 
of his presence are moral renewal, new in- 
crements of moral insight and power, the 
ceaselessly growing moral life. Not that 
the sense or thought of God and of the self 
are simultaneously and continuously pres- 
ent in consciousness in such an experience. 
But when one feels that he is experiencing 
the presence of God, or judges that he has 
experienced him, the event so apprehended 
proves to be marked by moral creativeness. 
And the acme of this type of experience is 



32 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

when one is engaged in some work that 
proves to be genuinely fruitful for the de- 
velopment of personality in others. To 
evoke moral originality in others is to feel 
the creative thrill that seems to pass from 
Jehovah's outstretched finger, in Michael 
Angelo's fresco, to the awakening Adam. 
It is to have a sense of being in contact with 
reality in a new and deeper way and of 
functioning harmoniously with it. So with 
the preacher expression and insight often 
come in the same flash. The teacher often 
finds that the successful imparting of truth 
brings with it fresh discovery. The parent 
knows that as he reverently tries to guide 
the development of his child's personality 
he is deepening his own relation to the prin- 
ciples of existence. The statesman, as he 
is forced by great responsibility to think and 
act for his people in new ways, experiences 
a corresponding enlargement of personal 
powers and finds himself gaining a new grasp 
upon the laws of life. Or if in such experi- 
ences the state of mind is too largely ob- 
jective to permit these apprehensions of 
their meaning, then afterward one judges: 
"At those times of work for the unfolding 
of human lives I lived most deeply. The 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 33 

deeper facts and the greater values met 
right here in my soul in some new and con- 
structive way. I experienced God/' 

This then is the great meaning and value 
that the experience of God is capable of 
having for the development of personality. 
It can interpenetrate with the experience of 
moral creativity in such a way as to further 
that experience. It can either give birth to 
new creative powers, or it can in turn be 
reborn from them, so that the total effect 
becomes a sustaining, fostering, and en- 
larging of spiritual originality, a new growth 
of personal life. And this is simply the old 
religious paradox which must be experienced 
afresh whenever religion rises to these 
higher levels — in losing one's life for others 
there is a new finding; working out our own 
salvation means God working his own will 
within us; in service is the true freedom, and 
only the free can truly serve; the true great- 
ness is humility, but he only is humble who 
courageously does the will of God. 

Even without a conscious recognition of 
this paradox its fruits for life may come to 
pass. An experience of God which has 
other aims than the development of per- 
sonality may yet produce such develop- 



34 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

ment; and certainly great creative powers 
have not infrequently appeared in persons 
who possessed no conscious experience of 
God. But if the paradox is sufficiently 
grounded in reality, the conscious recogni- 
tion of it, and the shaping of life in harmony 
with it, should be matters of vital impor- 
tance. And to an age for which the develop- 
ment of personality has become a momen- 
tous problem, and which at the same time 
is reaching out in new ways after religion, 
we can say: There is an experience of God 
which makes for the development of per- 
sonality because it interpenetrates in a 
vitalizing way with the experience of moral 
creativity. 

II 

But if the religious paradox is to have the 
meaning and value for modern life of which 
we have been speaking it must be ade- 
quately grounded in reality. For in the 
modes of religion that we have brought 
before ourselves, the objective and the sub- 
jective aspects, while they interpenetrate, 
by no means completely merge. The ex- 
perience of God does not dissolve into that 
of moral creativeness, but is felt to be also 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 35 

a functioning in relation with a super- 
human moral power. There is no question 
that this is true in the case of the prophetic 
consciousness of the Old Testament or the 
filial consciousness of the New; but it is 
also true of those men whose lives touch 
so influentially our own time. Bushnell, 
as we have seen, regarded faith as "the 
trusting of one's being to a being" Mar- 
tineau has expressly defined religion as be- 
lief in "a Divine Mind and Will ruling the 
universe and holding moral relations with 
mankind." 1 Ritschl's experience of mas- 
tery over the world and fidelity to an 
ethical vocation is conditioned upon a 
filial relation to a Power upon whom the 
entire world-order depends and who is 
working to accomplish a universal moral 
order among men. Tolstoi, although he 
is much more pantheistic in his thinking 
than any of these others, vigorously chal- 
lenges the idea that religion can be dis- 
solved into morality and science, and inter- 
prets the Infinite Will by the ethical teach- 
ings of Jesus, as he understands them. 
God, as an objective reality as well as an 
inward experience of moral creativity, is 

1 A Study of Religion, vol. I, p. 1. 



36 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

unmistakably felt and believed to be pres- 
ent in these modes of religion which promise 
real meaning and value for modern life. 

Now let us disregard the particular in- 
tellectual setting given by each of these 
men to their experience of objective divine 
reality, and let us try to find an equivalent 
for that experience for ourselves, as men 
facing an environment and a future already 
different from theirs in certain momentous 
ways. We are bound to do this, first of all, 
because all our thinking to-day must be in 
terms of evolution — an idea which in its 
modern sense had not been fully assimi- 
lated by any of these thinkers. And we are 
justified in doing this, because the most 
distinguishing mark of this objective divine 
reality is that it relates itself so vitally to 
moral creativeness. Putting this equiva- 
lent in a single phrase we may say: the 
religion that promises most for the develop- 
ment of personality is an experience of be- 
ing coworkers with an Eternal Creative Good 
Will. This is an experience which relates 
itself not to a world ready-made but to a 
world in the making, not to a world that as 
a whole is good or ever was good but to a 
world that is becoming good; it denotes 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 37 

not a God who once was the author of crea- 
tion or of a plan of salvation, but a God 
who all through the time process and at 
this present moment is creating new facts 
and new values, and whose moral energies 
are ceaselessly going forth to eliminate 
evil from the world and to organize every 
bit of mind that exists into a spiritual uni- 
verse; it involves a conception of man as 
revealing, when he rises to the heights of 
moral creativity, the deepest mystery of 
existence, and as capable of being a sharer 
in the creative and redemptive work of 
God. In its great characteristics it is ex- 
pressed in the wonderful eighth chapter of 
Romans, and particularly in its closing 
words, so meaningful for the present hour: 
"For I am persuaded that neither death, 
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor 
power, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
creature, shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord/' But it is an experience which, 
if sufficiently grounded in reality, must be 
ever renewing its forms of expression and 
ever taking on new meanings through the 
ages. 



38 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

But in the minds of some of our leading 
psychologists of religion this experience of 
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative 
Good Will is lacking in validity. In par- 
ticular Leuba, in his Psychological Study of 
Religion, takes such a position. "The re- 
ligion of the future/' he asserts, "will have 
to rest content apparently with the idea of 
a non-purposive Creative Force, making 
of the universe neither an accidental crea- 
tion nor one shaped in accordance with 
some preconceived plan. 55 He recognizes, 
it is true, a legitimate need for a concep- 
tion of "the transhuman Force of which 
humanity is an expression,' 5 but he rejects 
the thought of this Force as Purposive In- 
telligence because that would land us back 
in theism, the error of which he feels that 
he has shown. He rejects, too, the Chris- 
tian conception of a Father God, on the 
ground that "belief in the Christian God 
rests no longer upon the wonders of the 
physical universe, nor upon metaphysical 
arguments, but upon certain inner experi- 
ences, 551 and that this belief is substanti- 
ated by modern theology only by withdraw- 
ing these experiences from psychological 

1 Op. cit, p. 232. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 39 

analysis and arbitrarily giving them final- 
ity. 1 But he holds that "A religion in 
agreement with the accepted body of scien- 
tific knowledge, and centred about Human- 
ity conceived as the manifestation of a 
Force tending to the creation of an ideal 
society, would occupy the place that a 
religion should normally hold — even the 
place that the Christian religion lost when 
its cardinal beliefs ceased to be in harmony 
with secular beliefs. 5 ' 2 

The issue raised by Leuba, then, is be- 
tween religion involving belief in a Purposive 
Intelligence with whom one can have a spiri- 
tual relation analogous to the human social 
relation — that is, the Father God of Chris- 
tianity — and a cult of "Humanity idealized 
and conceived as a manifestation of [non- 
purposive] Creative Energy. 5 ' 3 Thus on 
the basis of an inductive psychological study 
of religion Leuba challenges at a vital point 
the experience of God which consists in 
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative 
Good Will. One important difference, how- 
ever, must be noted between the issue as 
Leuba states it and as it develops out of the 

1 Cf. op. cit., chap. XI. 

2 Op. cit., p. 336. 3 Op. cit., p. 335. 



40 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

study we are making. It is not simply a 
Purposive Intelligence of which we are 
speaking but a Creative Intelligence; not 
a Providence working only according to an 
eternally fixed plan but a Creative Moral 
Intelligence both working toward the real- 
ization of his purposes and creating new 
purposes. Nevertheless the issue in its 
religious meaning remains largely the same. 
It is the old and fundamental issue of the 
personality of God, simply adapted to 
evolutionary thought and to certain new 
ethical values. For, as William James 
wrote: "In whatever other respects the 
divine personality may differ from ours or 
may resemble it, the two are consanguin- 
eous at least in this — that both have pur- 
poses for which they care, and each can hear 
the other's calk" 1 

The importance of this issue is shown by 
the fact that the shock to our conception of 
humanity produced by the war is causing 
many to react from the idea of an imper- 
sonal non-purposive God, not indeed toward 
an omnipotent Providence who has mysteri- 
ously planned all that happens, but toward 
a personal God, purposive and creative even 

1 The Will to Believe, p. 122. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 41 

though finite. In fact, it is held by some 
that he must be finite, in order not to be the 
author of the colossal evils of humanity. 
But to the values involved in this issue we 
shall be returning in the following lecture; 
and Leuba himself seems almost to admit 
the superior practical value of Christian 
theism over the more pantheistic view. 1 
His objection is rather that Christian theism 
is illogical and arbitrarily derived from the 
facts of religious psychology, and on this ob- 
jection his whole argument rests; for he 
says little to justify the idea of "a non-pur- 
posive Creative Force. " 

Now let us freely grant Leuba's conten- 
tion that no inner experiences can legiti- 
mately be withdrawn from the analysis of 
the psychologist of religion, and let us admit 
also that modern theology often has done 
this and so has given a fictitious "finality" 
to its results. Our question then becomes 
that of the legitimate interpretation of the 
consciousness of being coworkers with an 
Eternal Creative Good Will — making use 
of any facts or values from the psychology 
of religion which may throw light upon it, 
arbitrarily excluding none, and holding 

1 Cf. op. cit., p. 291. 



42 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

both data and results open to further anal- 
ysis. 

William James, in his Varieties of Relig- 
ious Experience, discusses "the Reality of 
the Unseen/' and he begins by pointing out 
how ideas may produce in us the feeling of 
reality just as truly as objects of sense. 
This they do when, like objects of sense, they 
determine our practical attitudes and elicit 
reactions from us of sufficient intensity and 
range. And he gives abundant evidence to 
show how religious ideas have this property 
to a peculiar degree. "It is," he writes, 
"as if there were in the human conscious- 
ness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective 
presence, a perception of what we may call 
* something there/ more deep and more 
general than any of the special and partic- 
ular 6 senses' by which the current psy- 
chology supposes existent realities to be 
originally revealed. If this were so," he 
continues, "we might suppose the senses to 
waken our attitudes and conduct as they 
so habitually do, by first exciting this sense 
of reality; but anything else, any idea, for 
example, that might similarly excite it, 
would have that same prerogative of ap- 
pearing real which objects of sense normally 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 43 

possess. So far as religious conceptions 
were able to touch this reality feeling, they 
would be believed in spite of criticism." 1 

Now in the type of religion with which we 
are here concerned — the consciousness of 
coworking with an Eternal Creative Good 
Will — that which most profoundly stimu- 
lates this reality sense is the experience of 
moral creativeness. That is to say, in this 
type of religion the process of discovering 
values and reconstructing facts in accor- 
dance with those values — which is what 
moral creativity means — is felt to be more 
real than the facts taken by themselves. It 
is felt to be the fullest contact between the 
individual soul and the environing world. 
Moral creativity in the human personality 
presents itself as continuous with a greater 
moral creativity in the universe at large. 
When original moral power is finding ex- 
pression in us, and when we are aiding in 
calling forth the like in others, we most truly 
live, we are most real, and at the same 
time we are most harmoniously related to 
the wider reality on which we all depend. 

Such is the testimony of the type of re- 
ligion before us, and upon it rests the first 

1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 58. 



44 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

point in our argument for the objective 
validity of the experience of an Eternal 
Creative Good Will. Not that such testi- 
mony can be accepted uncritically. On the 
contrary it will mean little for modern life 
unless it will stand criticism. Our point 
here is simply this. Like every other atti- 
tude toward life the attitude of religious 
faith centres in some experience or function 
which has a peculiar power to stimulate 
the sense of reality. For the naturalistic 
attitude it is the objects of the physical 
senses which do this most successfully; 
for optimism it is feelings of happiness; for 
pessimism those of pain; for authority re- 
ligion it is fixity of spiritual institutions and 
ideas; for mysticism it is experiences of 
ecstasy; for the type of religious faith we 
are dealing with it is moral creativity. 
Each of these attitudes must subject itself 
to the fullest testing and criticism from all 
sides of experience if it is to offer itself as a 
philosophy of life for the modern world, 
but no criticism would be adequate which 
did not penetrate to the organizing centre 
of the several systems, namely, the ele- 
ments in experience which most effectively 
stimulate the reality sense. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 45 

But some one may object at this point: 
Are you not, in employing this term "the 
reality sense/ 5 accepting as an ultimate 
datum something that itself is susceptible 
of psychological analysis? We may re- 
join, however, that nothing in our argument 
depends upon this sense of reality being 
unanalyzable. James himself has sug- 
gested something in the nature of an 
analysis in the conjecture which he makes 
as to the organic seat of this reality feeling. 
"Nothing," he says, "could be more nat- 
ural than to connect it with the muscular 
sense, with the feeling that our muscles 
were innervating themselves for action. 
Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, 
or 'made our flesh creep' — our senses are 
what do so oftenest — might then appear 
real and present, even though it were an 
abstract idea." 1 But the point for us 
now is that this reality feeling, whether 
further analyzable or not, inevitably enters 
as a relatively simple element into all our 
more comprehensive attitudes toward life, 
and hence is a legitimate part of their 
claim to convincingness. 

But this fact — that moral creativity is ca- 

1 Oy. cit. 9 p. 63. 



46 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

pable of arousing in a unique way the reality 
sense and so of furnishing a clew for the 
interpretation of the universe — if left to 
itself would not go far toward establishing 
the objective validity of the consciousness 
of coworking with an Eternal Creative 
Good Will. The completion of the argu- 
ment, indeed, will require the discussions 
of the two following lectures, which are to 
deal with the relation of the experience of 
God to social progress and to cosmic evolu- 
tion. But a further step can be taken here 
in closing the discussion of our data taken 
from the psychology of personal religion. 
Professor Coe, in his recent Psychology of 
Religion, has arrived at a result which is 
important for our thought at this point. 
"It is of the utmost significance/' he says, 
"that, whenever one takes an absorbing 
interest in any particular thing or enter- 
prise, one idealizes it, organizes other in- 
terests about it, and thus finds one's real 
world partly by having a share in making it 
real. This way of organizing experience 
in terms of ideal values is a first item in the 
religious nature of man." 1 Now if this 
be true there is something in the very na- 
ture of religion, making it possible for it to 

1 P. 324. 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 47 

test, to verify, to criticise, and to recon- 
struct its own ideas. At all events, this is 
what a philosophy of religion must do. It 
must test all religious ideas by their capacity 
to organize experience. Now in the in- 
quiry which we already have made into the 
meaning and value of the consciousness of 
God for modern life we have found a type 
of that consciousness which has great ca- 
pacity for organizing experience in that it 
makes for the development of personality, 
and working through one personality is a 
powerful aid in calling forth personality in 
others. But it is precisely the blending of a 
supreme value — moral creativity — and the 
reality sense which gives to this conscious- 
ness its organizing power. The conscious- 
ness of God and an experience of moral 
creativity interpenetrate, and thereby the 
personality as a whole becomes newly or- 
ganized and enters into a more harmonious 
and persistent development. One has an 
experience of coworking with an Eternal 
Creative Good Will, and the accompanying 
development of personality, together with 
the power of this development to propagate 
itself to others, is a partial verification of the 
reality of that kind of God. 

Now let us be very specific about the 



48 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

nature of the argument we are making. 
The fact that a great value powerfully 
stimulates the reality sense simply gives 
us a working hypothesis; but this is the 
legitimate first step, which any philosophy 
of life must take. The power of this work- 
ing hypothesis to organize and fructify ex- 
perience is its verification, and a partial 
verification has already been produced in 
the development of personality which, this 
working hypothesis fosters. This verifica- 
tion helps to raise the hypothesis to the 
level of a reasonable theory. It is of course 
no a priori demonstration of God which 
this kind of reasoning will yield, but simply 
a reasoned interpretation of experience. 
But on the other hand we are aiming to 
avoid the error, charged by Leuba against 
modern theology, of giving arbitrary final- 
ity to certain inner experiences by isolating 
them from the rest of experience. By the 
method we are following the apprehension 
of values and their verification move along 
together, as a tractor advances upon its 
own caterpillar track. This may not mean 
intellectual rapid transit, but it is perhaps 
a good way of getting into new country. 
But the view which we are developing 



AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 49 

does not simply stand alongside that of 
Leuba as a legitimate rival theory. For it 
presents a higher value than Leuba's view 
and is capable of completer verification. 
From the standpoint of value a Non-Pur- 
posive Creative Force is most inadequate, 
since even with man the purposive develop- 
ment of life is actually taking place on an 
important scale. To think of God as being 
unqualified for this highest of human func- 
tions can hardly be an inspiration to faith. 
And the verification for the idea of a 
Creative Moral Intelligence is greater than 
that for a Non-Purposive Creative Force to 
all who find that the progress of the human 
race in the past, and that hoped for in the 
future, is proportionate to the exercise of 
mind in discovering values and realizing 
them in facts. A Non-Purposive Creative 
Force is like a blind Samson, able to tri- 
umph over the Philistines only by pulling 
the temple down upon them and "upon 
himself. A Creative Moral Intelligence is 
like the pioneer who compels his very ob- 
stacles in the wilderness to furnish the ma- 
terial for a new civilization. 

Thus to an age that is reaching out after 
a new religion, under a desperate sense of 



50 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

overwhelming unsolved problems, we may- 
make this response, which our other dis- 
cussions will seek more fully to justify: 
there is a religion in the world which has 
self-renewing and self -reconstructive power 
and which affords a solution of one of the 
most fundamental problems of our confused 
and aching time — the problem of devel- 
oping personality. It is not the religion 
of any institution, though it can mould in- 
stitutions. It is not the religion of any 
authoritative creed, though it can produce 
great guiding convictions. It is not the 
religion of a revelation finished in the re- 
mote past, though it has its roots deep in 
the past. It is the religion of the Hebrew 
prophetic consciousness, of Jesus' filial con- 
sciousness, of the modern Christian experi- 
ence of coworking with an Eternal Crea- 
tive Good Will. 



II 



THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND SOCIAL 
PROGRESS 

The idea of social progress made the first 
thirteen years of the twentieth century a 
period of great exhilaration. The nine- 
teenth century had brought men a marvel- 
lous control over nature, and in the new 
century society as a whole was beginning to 
reap the benefits. The vast accumulations 
of wealth which machinery and industrial 
organization had made possible were be- 
coming available in new ways for the com- 
mon welfare. The general diffusion of 
education which political liberalism had 
brought about had awakened the collective 
mind and had set the masses of the people 
to thinking about the improvement of their 
own condition. Humanity was like a pio- 
neer family, which, after a long struggle to 
subdue the wilderness and make it pro- 
ductive, is beginning to take a more direct 
and conscious interest in its own intellectual 
and social advancement. Each of us, as we 
felt the pulses of new life moving in the 

51 



52 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

social order about us, must have faced the 
future with fresh alertness and zest. 

The rapidity with which this idea of 
social progress was permeating humanity 
was indeed remarkable. Professor Ross, 
of Wisconsin University, discussing "the 
world-wide advance of democracy," wrote 
in 1912: " Within six years we have seen 
the creation of parliaments in Turkey, Rus- 
sia, Persia, and China, the birth of a re- 
public in Portugal and in China, the over- 
throw of 'Diaz-potism' in Mexico, the 
startling spread of unrest in India, and the 
growth of political socialism in all Western 
countries." 1 And this development was 
no less remarkable in its intensive than its 
extensive aspect. Said Professor Rauschen- 
busch, returning in 1908 from a year in 
Europe: "Meanwhile the social awakening 
of our nation had set in like an equinoctial 
gale in March, and ... I found myself 
caught in the tail of the storm. . . . Men 
asked: 'What must we do? And what 
must we undo? What social ideal should 
guide us? What methods can we safely 
use in realizing it V " 2 Indeed one has only 

1 Changing America, p. 21. 

2 Christianizing the Social Order, p. vii. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 53 

to enumerate a few of the matters that were 
agitating the public mind — initiative, ref- 
erendum, and recall, the short ballot, con- 
servation, child labor, progressive taxation 
of inheritances and incomes, government of 
cities by commission or manager, arbitra- 
tion of industrial disputes, playgrounds, 
rural betterment, eugenics, social hygiene, 
feminism — one has only to make such a 
random list to realize how far into the old 
social order the virus of progressive ideas 
had penetrated, Progressivism had be- 
come a political creed, a philosophy, al- 
most a religion. 

And then came the Great War upon us, 
and we began to perceive that all this 
social awakening had arrived too late — at 
least too late to proceed by any process of 
normal evolution. Rapidly as the spirit 
of social progress was spreading, it could 
not cope with the long-accumulated mass 
of social problems. For seventy-five years 
most of the best minds had been occupied 
with the material development of the world 
and comparatively few had concerned them- 
selves with social reconstruction. Physical 
invention had outrun moral invention. 
Organization for business had altogether 



54 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

surpassed organization for living. Inter- 
national trade had flourished like a green 
bay-tree and international ethics had lan- 
guished like a sickly vegetable underneath. 
The agents of exploiting syndicates were 
backed up far more consistently in their 
projects than the missionaries of the king- 
dom of God. And thus had arisen a con- 
dition of tension in the old social order at 
countless points — between races, nationali- 
ties, diplomats, tariffs, banking syndicates, 
and military and naval strategists; be- 
tween property and the proletariat, the 
home and the shop, the franchised and the 
disfranchised, the standpatters and the 
muck-rakers — while to the relief of these 
points of tension had come only a few 
spasmodic reform movements and the ten- 
tative programmes of a few detached social 
thinkers. What wonder, then, that the 
social awakening at the opening of the 
century brought to many of us the exhila- 
ration of a great hope ! And what wonder 
that it came too late ! 

I once saw a conflagration rage through 
a city. The whole population mobilized 
itself to fight the flames, and every one 
"did his bit," but in an afternoon and a 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 55 

night the heart of the city was eaten out. 
The fire was said to have started from the 
sparks of a tobacco-pipe dropped by some 
men who were gambling and drinking in a 
ramshackle, empty warehouse. But every 
thoughtful citizen knew that the deeper 
causes were lax building laws still more 
laxly enforced, fat rentals from flimsy 
buildings, and lack of civic spirit necessary 
to make an efficient city government and 
to grasp the new needs of a prosperous and 
growing city. Some such event as this is 
required, I believe, to symbolize the out- 
break of the present world disaster. It 
started, in one sense, of course, from the 
pistol-shot of the boy revolutionist in a 
little Bosnian town, but in a deeper sense 
it sprang from the inflammable material of 
unsolved social problems tolerated among 
the solid structures of civilization because 
the spirit of social progress had been allowed 
to slumber so long. 

At all events probably no one to-day will 
deny that social progress is, for us, not a 
swiftly unfolding and self-operating move- 
ment, but a tragically complicated and 
baffling problem. The ideal, indeed, has 
established itself in our minds. We have 



56 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

dreamed the dream of a vast social recon- 
struction; and we have even conceived 
reconstruction to be, not an abnormal 
event to remedy abnormal evils, but a 
normal continuing process by which evils 
should be prevented from arising. But 
what are the socializing forces which can 
set the ideal in operation, along what lines 
shall the reconstruction proceed, and what 
is to sustain and inspire humanity in the 
endless task ? Such are some of the features 
of the problem of social progress whicji is 
bewildering the mind of the world to-day, 
and which is causing that groping after a 
new religion mentioned in the previous 
discussion. It is in relation, then, to this 
intensest of present problems that we are 
to-day to consider the significance of the 
experience of God. Continuing the plan 
of the previous lecture we shall consider, 
first, what meaning and value for social 
progress the experience of God may have, 
and then what evidence for the validity of 
the experience of God may be afforded by 
social progress. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 57 



When one asks for the meaning and value 
of the experience of God for social progress 
one is confronted by the fact that some 
earnest thinkers hold that there is none — 
at least for enlightened minds. And in 
taking this position they have in view not 
simply the influence of the dogmatic creeds, 
which liberal theology itself has long since 
subjected to radical criticism, but the sim- 
ple Christian faith in a Father God. This 
faith, they say, not only has no positive 
value to enlightened minds for social prog- 
ress, but from the standpoint of the high- 
est values is subtly deleterious. 

Professor H. A. Overstreet has given ex- 
pression to this view in a recent article in 
The Forum, entitled "New Loyalties for 
Old Consolations." * He writes: "I re- 
member at the time of the San Francisco 
earthquake passing one of the cathedrals 
of the city and finding its broad, stone 
steps, covering a goodly portion of a city 
square, black with kneeling worshippers. 
There could be no question of their reason 
for being there. They were setting them- 

^Vol. 52, pp. 499/. 



58 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

selves right with their God, hoping that in 
the fervor of their devotion he would have 
mercy upon them and save them from 
destruction." In contrast to these Over- 
street says: " Other men and women were 
distributing bread and clothing to destitute 
families, or were building shelters, or were 
clearing the streets of debris, or were pa- 
trolling with gun on shoulder against crim- 
inal disorder." And farther on he sums up 
his thought as follows: "Is it unfair to say 
that the old religion with its confident, 
childlike resting on God ('He loves the 
burthen') developed a type of character 
that was not, in the mass, conspicuously 
heroic? 'God knows best 5 ; 'It will all 
come out right 5 ; 'Thy will be done' — these 
are not expressions of fighting men; they 
are expressions of men who resign them- 
selves to the ruling of powers greater than 
themselves. A civilization characterized by 
such an attitude will not be strenuously 
alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life. 
But the men who believe that the issue of 
the universe is in doubt, that there is no 
powerful God to lead the hosts to victory, 
w T ill, if they have the stuff of men in them, 
strike out their manliest to help whatever 
good there is in the world to win its way 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 59 

against the forces of evil. A civilization of 
such men will be a tough-fibred civilization, 
strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the 
Old Guard, to die but never surrender.'' 
"There is," he concludes, "something subtly 
weakening about the optimism of the tra- 
ditional religions. Like the historic sooth- 
ing syrup, with its unadvertised opiate, it 
soothes the distress not by curing the dis- 
ease, but by temporarily paralyzing the 
function. 'To trust God nor be afraid 5 
means in most cases — not all — to settle 
back from a too anxious concern about the 
evils of the world. 'God will take care of 
his own ! ' How different is this from the 
attitude: 'The task is ours and the whole 
world's and we must see it through ! ' ' 

A view similar to this is taken by some of 
the well-known leaders of the Ethical Cul- 
ture movement. Doctor Felix Adler, writ- 
ing from a standpoint less sharply con- 
trasted with theism than Overstreet's, 
nevertheless says: "Shall we then continue 
to think of a benignant and omnipotent 
Spirit bending down toward us from on 
high, whose face, indeed, may sometimes be 
veiled, but the light of whose love is never 
extinguished or diminished; to whom we 
can ever come as children saying: 'Father, 



60 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

protect us; Father, deliver us; Father, for- 
give us our trespasses' ?" Doctor Adler 
holds that the modern man no longer can 
use such terms, and he considers it better 
that he cannot. For, he says, "Life is a 
fight. We must take our part in it — the 
man's part. We must get rid of the notion 
that the affairs of the universe are managed 
with a view to securing our private benefit; 
that Fate, or the Power that overrules Fate, 
is disposed to coddle us." 1 So W. M. 
Salter, writing of "The Basis of the Ethical 
Movement," says: "To go straight to the 
heart of the matter, men have heretofore 
conceived of the Supreme Power of the 
world as a personal being like themselves. 
Many to-day, on the other hand, are con- 
strained to regard the personality of the 
Deity as an open question, and prayer as a 
useless expenditure of human energy. . . . 
Prayer seems almost a belittling of that 
solemn mystery in the bosom of which we 
and the wide world rest. For it is not . . . 
in the name of materialism or phenomenal- 
ism, but because of a deeper sense of that 
mystery, that I abandon prayer." 2 

1 The Religion of Duty, pp. 46, 47, 59. 

2 Ethical Religion, pp. 288-9. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 61 

The classic expression of the central point 
involved was given by Guyau in his Non- 
Religion of the Future; although he goes 
somewhat beyond the thinkers just men- 
tioned in that he rejects not only theism 
and the positivisms religion of Humanity, 
but also all attempts to think out for the 
future a new religion, and puts his faith 
solely in an idealistic sociology. I quote 
but a sentence: "The substitution of a 
human providence for the omnipresent in- 
fluence of a divine providence might be 
given as being, from this point of view, the 
formula of progress/' x 

Now these thinkers are all imbued with 
that loyalty to the ideal of social progress 
which we have seen meant a new awaken- 
ing of soul for the modern world, and which 
any religion that is to serve our time must 
promote; and yet they see in the Christian 
faith in a Father God something that, 
though fine and noble as compared with 
most forms of religion, nevertheless falls 
short of the best. They regard it as a seda- 
tive rather than a tonic, as a message of 
solace instead of a rallying-cry. They con- 
sider that its tendency is to inhibit the full 

1 Idem, p. 450. 



62 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

development of the moral nature, whereas 
they want a philosophy of life which con- 
centrates upon science, upon human effort, 
upon social enterprise. 

First of all, in considering this position, 
we should recognize that it is only a re- 
constructed form of the Christian experi- 
ence of God that can hope to stand against 
these criticisms. Many of the strictures 
on contemporary religion that have just 
been quoted need to be carefully weighed. 
They certainly are justified so far as the 
ideas that give form to religious experience 
have not been thoroughly thought through 
in relation to modern truth and modern 
needs. One cannot simply take over the 
metaphysical attributes of God, nor even 
the moral attributes, which were constructed 
in a world of thought radically different 
from our own, without producing an experi- 
ence of God that in some respects will be 
less than the best. Brave men rightly 
object to fighting with antiquated equip- 
ment. So earnest social workers will sim- 
ply drop by the roadside implements of 
thought which merely hamper them in 
their great offensive campaign. The idea 
of God must be remoulded in the light of our 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 63 

newer ethical values and of evolutionary 
philosophy, if it is to make a real contribu- 
tion to the solution of our urgent modern 
problems. 

But it was such a reconstructed form of 
the Christian experience that was intended 
in the first lecture when we spoke of the 
consciousness of coworking with an Eternal 
Creative Good Will. Those who have this 
consciousness put effort, the development 
of personality, moral creativity, in the fore- 
front of their thinking, and they are ready 
to face an imperfect but growing universe 
and to bear their part in its risks, its sacri- 
fices, and its toils. And yet, notwithstand- 
ing these reconstructions, the issue raised 
by Overstreet and the others, in one im- 
portant sense, remains. For we have held 
the consciousness of coworking with an 
Eternal Creative Good Will to be but the 
modern equivalent of the prophetic and 
the filial consciousness, and the idea of 
God involved is of One who is real and ob- 
jective as well as ideal and immanent. 
Moreover, to this idea of God personality 
is applicable. For, while the Eternal Crea- 
tive Good Will is vastly different from hu- 
man personality in many ways, yet, to use 



64 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

James's words again, the two are akin at 
least in this: "That each has purposes for 
which he cares and each can hear the 
other's call." It is a vital question, then, 
whether a religious experience that is bound 
up with this idea of God will make a posi- 
tive contribution toward solving the prob- 
lem of social progress or will subtly hinder 
such a solution. 

Now if we bring before ourselves clearly 
the largest issue upon which men's think- 
ing divides to-day, it will become evident, I 
believe, that social progress is vitally bound 
up with the experience of coworking with 
an Eternal Creative Good Will. The largest 
issue confronting our time is between an aris- 
tocratic, deterministic, nationalistic ethics and 
the ethics of democracy, of moral freedom, and 
of internationalism. In other words, it is 
the issue between the interests of selected, 
privileged, and in some respects superior 
groups bent upon maintaining the fixity of 
inherited ideals, and the interests of aspir- 
ing humanity bent upon the reconstruction 
and expansion of all its ideals. On the one 
side the autocrat, the captain of industry, 
the empire-builder, the dogmatist, the ec- 
clesiastical prince, administering the world's 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 65 

affairs — perhaps benevolently, always au- 
thoritatively; on the other side the mass 
of humanity, struggling up through the 
sense of individual liberty, through "class 
consciousness/' to race consciousness, and 
beginning to insist upon doing its own 
thinking, upon finding out for itself the 
real laws of the universe, and upon shaping 
the world according to its own deepest 
needs. 

To bring this issue more fully before us 
let me give a few citations from outstand- 
ing representatives of contemporary modes 
of thinking. For the meaning of aristo- 
cratic ethics in the modern world we look, 
of course, to Nietzsche. He sees the su- 
preme social issue as follows: "It is neces- 
sary for higher men to declare war upon the 
masses ! In all directions mediocre people 
are joining hands in order to make them- 
selves masters. Everything that pampers, 
that softens, and that brings the 'people' 
or ' woman' to the front, operates in favor 
of universal suffrage — that is to say, the 
dominion of inferior men." x For the super- 
man, he says, "the rest of mankind is but 
the soil on which he can devise his higher 

1 Will to Power, vol. II, sec. 861. 



66 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

mode of existence." 1 Over against this 
standpoint we may place that of democratic 
ethics, as expressed by Rauschenbusch. 
He writes: "We are told that democracy 
has proved a failure. It has, in so far as it 
was crippled and incomplete. Political de- 
mocracy without economic democracy is an 
uncashed promissory note, a pot without a 
roast, a form without substance. But in 
so far as democracy has become effective 
it has quickened everything it has touched. 
. . . Democracy has even quickened the 
moral conscience of the upper classes. . . . 
What aristocracy calls hereditary rights, a 
democracy calls scandalous graft." "De- 
mocracy is the archangel whom God has 
sent to set his blazing foot on these icebergs 
of human pride and melt them down." 2 

Parallel with the contrast between aris- 
tocratic and democratic ethics we may 
place that between determinism and moral 
freedom. Not that the individual thinker 
is always both aristocrat and determinist, 
or democrat and libertarian; but in their 
larger social effects the two contrasts tend 
to become one. If Nietzsche protests 

1 Idem, sec. 866. 

2 Christianizing the Social Order, pp. 353, 354, 364. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 67 

against determinism in the interests of the 
superman, his doctrine remains determi- 
nistic for the masses of the people. If the 
socialist's creed includes economic deter- 
minism, the larger democratic movement 
aims at creative personality for every man. 
No better representative of the deter- 
ministic point of view, in respect to popular 
influence, can be found than Haeckel. 
"The great struggle/ 5 he declares, "be- 
tween the determinist and the indetermin- 
ist, between the opponent and the sustainer 
of the freedom of the will, has ended to-day, 
after more than two thousand years, com- 
pletely in favor of the determinist. The 
human will has no more freedom than that 
of the higher animals, from which it differs 
only in degree, not in kind. . . . The 
character of the inclination was determined 
long ago by heredity from parents and an- 
cestors; the determination to each partic- 
ular act is an instance of adaptation to the 
circumstances of the moment wherein the 
strongest motive prevails, according to the 
laws which govern the statics of emotion." 1 
With this fatalism goes not only his rejec- 
tion of theism but his gross distortion of 

1 Riddle of the Universe, pp. 130-1. 



68 THE EXPERIENCE OP GOD 

Christianity, including its ethics. To be 
sure he accepts the Golden Rule. But he 
also says: "The supreme mistake of Chris- 
tian ethics, and one which runs directly 
counter to the Golden Rule, is its exagger- 
ation of love. • . . One of the Christian 
precepts that were impressed upon us in 
our early youth as of great importance, and 
that are glorified in millions of sermons, 
is 'Love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, do good to them that hate you, 
and pray for them that despitefully use 
you and persecute you/ It is a very ideal 
precept, but as useless in practice as it 
is unnatural." 1 Such an attitude throws 
aside the redemptive and progressive power 
of Christian social ethics and tends to re- 
duce social relations to a mechanical and 
static level. 

In contrast to this we may take the 
ethical standpoint of William James, which 
is adopted on the basis of his well-known 
belief in indeterminism. "The deepest dif- 
ference," he says, "in the moral life of man 
is the difference between the easy-going and 
the strenuous mood. The capacity for the 
strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in 

1 Idem, p. 353. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 69 

every man, but it has more difficulty in 
some than in others in waking up. It 
needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the 
big fears, loves, and indignations; or else 
the deeply penetrating appeal of some one 
of the higher fidelities, like justice, truth, 
or freedom. This is why, in a merely 
human world without a God, the appeal to 
our moral energy falls short of its maxi- 
mum stimulating power. Life, to be sure, 
is even in such a world a genuinely ethical 
symphony; but it is played in the compass 
of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite 
scale of values fails to open up. When, 
however, we believe that a God is there, 
and that he is one of the claimants, the in- 
finite perspective opens out. The scale of 
the symphony is incalculably prolonged. 
The more imperative ideals now begin to 
speak with an altogether new objectivity 
and significance, and to utter the pene- 
trating, shattering, tragically challenging 
note of appeal. All through history, in the 
periodical conflicts of puritanism with the 
don't-care temper, we see the antagonism 
of the strenuous and genial moods, and 
the contrast between the ethics of infinite 
and mysterious obligation from on high, 



70 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

and those of prudence and the satisfaction 
of merely finite need. Our attitude toward 
concrete evils is entirely different in a 
world where we believe there are none but 
finite demanders, from what it is in one 
where we joyously face tragedy for an in- 
finite Demander's sake. Every sort of en- 
ergy and endurance, of courage and ca- 
pacity for handling life's evils, is set free in 
those who have religious faith. For this 
reason the strenuous type of character will 
on the battle-field of human history always 
outwear the easy-going type, and religion 
will drive irreligion to the wall." x In such 
words as these the ethics of faith and moral 
freedom, essentially Christian in its re- 
demptive and progressive quality, rings out 
with inspiring and convincing power. 

But parallel to these contrasts between 
aristocratic and democratic ethics, and be- 
tween the ethics of determinism and that 
of moral freedom we have placed the con- 
trast between the ethics of nationalism and 
that of internationalism, and we must add 
brief examples from representatives of these 
two attitudes. A philosophy of history 

1 From "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in The 
Will to Believe, pp. 211-13, much abridged. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 71 

which has the effect of justifying nation- 
alism has been worked out by Houston 
Stewart Chamberlain in his Foundations of 
the Nineteenth Century. Chamberlain holds 
that modern civilization is due to the Teu- 
tons, meaning thereby not only the Ger- 
mans but the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, 
and the people of northern Europe in gen- 
eral so far as their blood has not been cor- 
rupted by intermingling with other stocks 
than the Teutonic. The essential point for 
understanding civilization is that of purity 
of stock. The Greeks brought forth classi- 
cal culture because of their purity of stock, 
but the Roman Empire hindered the rise of 
modern civilization by producing a "chaos 
of peoples" around the Mediterranean, 
and by bequeathing the idea of the Holy 
Roman Empire to northern Europe. Chris- 
tianity also hindered it by the idea of the 
oneness of humanity and by producing the 
Roman Catholic Church, which assumed to 
transcend lines of nationality — Jesus, how- 
ever, is claimed for modern civilization by 
a curious theory that he was not of Semitic 
but of Aryan stock. The Renaissance also, 
instead of being the beginning of modern 
civilization, hindered its coming through its 



72 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

vague humanitarianism. But now at last 
a characteristic civilization is being worked 
out by the Teutons, and the thing of most 
importance for the furtherance of this civili- 
zation is to recognize this principle of purity 
of stock. The ethical significance of this 
position comes out in such words as the fol- 
lowing: "So soon as we speak of humanity 
in general, so soon as we indulge in the 
fancy that we discern in history a develop- 
ment, a progress, an education of € mankind/ 
we leave the sure ground of facts and float 
off into airy abstractions. This humanity, 
about which men have philosophized so 
much, suffers from the grave defect that it 
does not exist at all. Nature and history 
present us with a great number of different 
types of men, but not with one humanity." 1 
So strong is Chamberlain's emphasis upon 
distinctions of racial stock that he declares: 
"The hunter through sympathy under- 
stands more of the soul of his dog, and the 
dog more of the soul of his master, than 
that same master understands of the soul 
of the Chinese, with whom he may be out 
hunting." 

Over against such a standpoint we may 

1 Vol. II, p. 837. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 73 

place the words of a man who is perhaps the 
greatest single force for internationalism in 
this warring world, John R. Mott. The 
missionary enterprise, he affirms, "must 
ever be looked upon as but a means to the 
mighty and inspiring object of enthroning 
Christ in individual life, in family life, in 
national life, in international relations, in 
every relationship of mankind." 1 

Now just as aristocracy means determin- 
ism from the standpoint of the masses of 
men, and democracy means moral freedom, 
so aristocracy and determinism together 
naturally make common cause with nation- 
alism, which tends to give finality to exist- 
ing political, economic, and cultural group- 
ings, and democracy and moral freedom 
make common cause with international- 
ism, which would provide for the progres- 
sive reconstruction of all such groupings. 
Hence the contrasts which we have drawn 
between individual thinkers are parts of 
one dominating contrast which is fundamen- 
tal for our age — the contrast between the ethics 
of privilege and the ethics of progress, or the 
contrast between an aristocratic, determin- 
istic, nationalistic ethics and the ethics of 

1 The Evangelization of the World in This Generation, p. 16. 



74 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

democracy, of moral freedom, and of in- 
ternationalism. And this contrast is es- 
sentially the one drawn long ago by Jesus, 
when he said: "Ye know that they who 
are accounted to rule over the Gentiles 
lord it over them; and their great ones exer- 
cise authority over them. But it is not so 
among you: but whosoever would become 
great among you shall be your minister; 
and whosoever would be first among you 
shall be servant of all." 

But the point of especial importance to 
us at this time is that each of these types 
of ethics is supported by a characteristic 
world view. The world view which sup- 
ports the aristocratic ethics is that of 
naturalism. Nietzsche's doctrine is defi- 
nitely atheistic. "Dead are all the gods/' 
he cries; "now let the Superman live!" 
And his whole philosophy of the "will to 
power" rests upon an interpretation of 
evolution in which the struggle for existence 
is the last word. Haeckel considers that he 
has reduced the Christian idea of God to a 
piece of outgrown anthropomorphism, "a 
gaseous vertebrate," to use his own term, 
and eliminated him. Chamberlain, it is 
true, makes much of Christ, of personality, 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 75 

and of creative genius, but he subordinates 
them all so completely to the struggle of 
racial stocks, which he accepts as a finality, 
that he does not escape from naturalism. 
Evolution in the narrower sense of the strug- 
gle for existence is for all these thinkers the 
basis of their theory of life. Whereas in 
former times the ethics of privilege in- 
trenched itself in ecclesiastical dogmatism, 
now it seeks to buttress itself with science, 
but with a science that, in its turn, is inter- 
preted in a dogmatic way. It is the facts, 
the plain hard facts of biological evolution, 
of class division and of race conflict, which 
are appealed to as the key to the meaning 
of the universe and hence as being the 
justification of the ethics of privilege. 

On the other hand the world view which 
supports democratic ethics is spiritualistic. 
"Wanted : a faith for a task!" cries Rau- 
schenbusch. "A great task," he insists, 
"demands a great faith. To live a great 
life a man needs a great cause to which 
he can surrender, something divinely large 
and engrossing for which he can live, and, 
if need be, die. A great religious faith will 
lift him out of his narrow grooves and make 
him the inspired instrument of the univer- 



76 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

sal will of God. It is the point at which 
the mind of man coincides with the mind of 
the Eternal." "Our moral efficiency de- 
pends on our religious faith. The force of 
will, of courage, of self-sacrifice liberated by 
a living religious faith is so incalculable, so 
invincible, that nothing is impossible when 
that power enters the field." "Our genera- 
tion needs a faith, for it is confronting the 
mightiest task ever undertaken consciously 
by a generation of men." 1 From essen- 
tially the same standpoint James insists 
upon the need of the moral life for "an in- 
finite Demander" and affirms that "Even 
if there were no metaphysical or traditional 
grounds for believing in a God, men would 
postulate one simply as a pretext for liv- 
ing hard." 2 So likewise Mott's great work 
for internationalism is bound up with the 
missionary faith in the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. 

This alliance between faith and demo- 
cratic ethics cannot be broken down by 
pointing to the historic movement which 
has social democracy and internationalism 
as its creed but which has linked itself up 

1 Christianizing the Social Order, pp. 40, 41. 
* Will to Believe, p. 211. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 77 

with the philosophy of naturalism. For 
this situation is too plainly the result of 
reaction against antiquated theology, and 
against the support given by ecclesiasticism 
to the ethics of privilege, to reveal the deeper 
issues involved; and it is a situation that, 
before the war, had shown marked signs of 
giving way. 1 Such a situation indeed con- 
stitutes a challenge to the Christian Church 
which it cannot evade, and which it must 
prove its power to meet successfully with- 
out too long delay. Nevertheless in prin- 
ciple it seems plain that naturalism, with 
its emphasis upon the struggle for existence 
as a finality in this universe, is an alien 
enemy in the ranks of social democracy, 
masking as a friend but destined sooner or 
later to betray it to Nietzscheanism and the 
ethics of privilege. 

But Overstreet and the leaders of Ethical 
Culture, on the other hand, unmistakably 
stand for the ethics of progress. Such prin- 
ciples as democracy, moral freedom, and 
internationalism occupy a foremost place in 
their teachings. What then of their adverse 



1 Cf. Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, by Weinel and 
Widgery, chap. IV; and Haw, "Religious Revival in the Labor 
Movement," Hibbert Journal, 1915. 



78 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

judgment upon the Christian faith in a 
Father God? In the light of the funda- 
mental issue which we have found running 
through the thought of our time one must 
raise the question whether these thinkers 
have rightly appreciated the vital relation 
between men's ideals of progress and the 
world views by which they relate those 
ideals to experience as a whole. This may 
be due, in some instances, to the fact that 
they have been largely preoccupied with 
another issue — that between ethics and a 
dogmatic, authoritative theology. Or it 
may be due in part to the slow emergence 
of the more fundamental issue, which has 
only become fully manifest through the 
Great War. But whatever the cause it is 
fair to ask whether, in view of the fact 
that the ethics of privilege has intrenched 
itself in naturalism, these critics of Christian 
theism can support the ethics of progress 
with an adequate world view. 

I say an adequate world view, for it is by 
no means true that these writers have over- 
looked altogether the point in question. 
While Ethical Culture as an organized 
movement purposely declines to adopt any 
views whatever as to the transhuman realm, 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 79 

as individual thinkers the men we have 
quoted all feel the need of a conception of 
the universe in some sense spiritualistic. 
Doctor Adler, indeed, states his convictions 
about the universe in such a way that one 
wonders whether he really rejects the faith 
in an Eternal Creative Good Will. "Three 
ideas/' he says, "the idea of righteousness, 
the idea that justice will gain the ascendant, 
and that there is a sublime purpose in things 
— three aspects of one idea — these I would 
not give up. I do not see how any coura- 
geous attitude toward life is possible unless 
one, either avowedly or surreptitiously, 
retains them." 1 Salter, on the other hand, 
limits himself to an agnosticism pervaded 
by a spiritualistic tone of feeling, as we 
already have seen in his reference to the 
Supreme Power of the universe as a mystery 
too solemn for prayer and as "light unap- 
proachable, unthinkable." 

But more characteristic of this ethics of 
progress which rejects theism is the pan- 
psychic view of the universe, and this is the 
line of Overstreet's speculation. He con- 
fronts the prophecy of naturalism that the 
universe is running down and will end in a 

1 Religion of Duty, p. 57. 



80 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

lifeless, frozen mass, but affirms that "the 
old dogmatic materialism has had to give 
way to a critical and open-minded evolu- 
tionism." 1 "Even now/' he says, "psy- 
chology is making groping advances into 
the region of plant life, with results that 
increasingly confirm our suspicion that the 
region of psychical activity extends below 
the so-called animal plane of life." And 
then, pointing to the continuity between 
the organic and inorganic realms, he reaches 
speculatively the result that the inorganic 
may prove to be "fundamentally the same 
in kind as the most advanced forms of life." 2 
This, in the form of a hypothesis, is the 
panpsychic view of the universe. And I 
have called it the more characteristic posi- 
tion of the trend with which we are dealing 
because it easily links itself up with the 
"republic of souls," with which as a dis- 
tant ideal this trend seeks to replace the 
monotheistic faith in God and the kingdom 
of God. 

Can the panpsychic view of the universe, 
projected on toward a republic of souls, 



1 Forum, vol. LII, p. 507. 

2 "The Democratic Conception of God," Hibbert Journal, 
vol. XI, pp. 405, 406. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 81 

replace the consciousness of coworking 
with an Eternal Creative Good Will as a 
support for the ethics of progress over 
against naturalism and the ethics of priv- 
ilege? It seems to me that the idea that 
such a substitution can be made success- 
fully, for mankind in general and in the 
long run, is open to the gravest doubt. 
Panpsychism, apart from God, lines up be- 
hind class struggle, race struggle, war, and 
imperialism, and supplies them w r ith a phi- 
losophy suited to their needs. The struggle 
between Persian and Greek, Goth and Ro- 
man, Saracen and Christian, Mongol and 
Chinese, the social conflict between prop- 
ertied classes and the proletariat, the pres- 
ent chaos of civilization through clashing 
economic forces and military alliances — 
these are for panpsychism not only facts of 
existence, as they must be for any philos- 
ophy, but ultimate facts, to cope with which 
there is no intelligence higher than the 
human. Panpsychism without God reduces 
the universe to a welter of instincts, on 
the surface of which human intelligence 
would seem to be little more than a tran- 
sient phosphorescent light. Its inherent 
tendency, therefore, is toward an aristo- 



82 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

cratic rather than a democratic ethics — that 
is, toward finding the meaning of the whole 
in the select breeds and the segregated social 
cultures which here and there may arise 
rather than in a redemption for all men and 
for all human society. 

Not so with the faith in an Eternal Crea- 
tive Good Will. In the midst of all the per- 
plexing maze of facts, evil and good, it finds 
God himself as one of the facts — a striving 
God, working through and beyond all hu- 
man moral strivings toward the elimina- 
tion of the evil and the establishment of the 
good. One who has an experience of co- 
working with such a God does not throw a 
robe of charity over the evil facts and call 
them good, after the fashion of the absolutist 
philosopher or theologian. Nor does he 
seek an emotional rhapsody in which the 
distinctions between evil and good dissolve, 
after the manner of the mystic. But he 
does know the stern joy of sharing in the 
making of a moral world with a God who 
has brought man upon the stage of existence 
in the midst of his own creative processes. 
The work, the struggle, the sacrifice, the 
insights, the defeats and the victories are 
his and God's together. He is quite willing 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 83 

to interpret the kingdom of God as a com- 
monwealth of God, so much does the idea 
of coworking with God and man in a great 
moral enterprise mean to him; but the God 
from whom he draws his strength he be- 
lieves to be great enough to be working in 
the distant stars as well, and to have been 
working when the first instinctive life be- 
gan to move upon this planet. 

Such an experience gives the strongest 
support to the ethics of progress. The 
consciousness of sonship to God which it 
involves gives a far bolder ideal in its for- 
ward reach than that of the superman, and 
at the same time it is a dynamic source of 
democracy because it recognizes the infinite 
value of every human soul. Such an ex- 
perience too sustains and nourishes moral 
freedom, because it recognizes every crea- 
tive impulse within itself as a pulse-beat in 
the Infinite Creative Life. And out of 
such an experience arises likewise the ethics 
of internationalism. For from the begin- 
ning the Christian consciousness of son- 
ship has worked toward the breaking down 
of every "middle wall of partition" be- 
tween race and race, and has set forth the 
ideal of the organic unity of mankind in 



84 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

Christ. Through its support of the ethics 
of democracy, of moral freedom, and of 
internationalism we may justly maintain 
that the consciousness of coworking with 
an Eternal Creative Good Will has inex- 
haustible meaning and value for social 
progress. 



II 



But it is time for us to relate what we 
have been saying to the topic of the ob- 
jective validity of the experience of God. 
In the first lecture we found that the 
experience of moral creativity is in a pe- 
culiar degree capable of arousing the real- 
ity sense and thus furnishes a hopeful clew 
to the meaning of the universe. In the 
consciousness of coworking with a morally 
creative God this experience gains an im- 
portant verification through its power to 
promote the development of personality 
and to propagate that development to 
others. Thus what is at first, from the 
standpoint of philosophy, a working hy- 
pothesis becomes elevated to a reasonable 
theory. And this takes place by the only 
process by which a philosophy of life can 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 85 

hope to establish itself — by the process of 
organizing experience. 

But the verification of the faith in an 
Eternal Creative Good Will which comes 
through the development of personality is 
necessarily only partial and points on to 
social experience as the realm where it can 
be made more nearly complete. Our next 
step, therefore, is to consider the objective 
validity of this faith in the light of social 
progress. 

It must be pointed out at once, however, 
that our argument for the objective validity 
of a morally creative God has been implic- 
itly given already in setting forth the mean- 
ing and value of the experience of him. 
For any thorough-going organization of 
experience will have to include values as 
well as facts. And consequently, in show- 
ing the high social value of the conscious- 
ness of coworking with God, we have es- 
tablished a reasonable presumption of the 
reality of God and have furnished for that 
presumption important positive proof. In 
other words, the ideal of social progress 
postulates an Eternal Creative Good Will, 
and the fact of social progress affords to that 
postulate the most significant verification. 



86 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

Yet there are important aspects of this 
argument from social progress which must 
be explicitly brought out, if we are to ap- 
preciate it rightly. In the first place, the 
postulate of God which is contained in the 
ideal of social progress might be thought 
of as resting upon an a priori authority 
of the moral consciousness, conceived after 
the manner of Kant; and if so, the rejoinder 
immediately is suggested that a moral con- 
sciousness possessing that kind of authority 
is sufficient to itself, and is only weakened 
by the claim that a God must be postulated 
in its support. It is, indeed, some such 
idea of the absolute self-sufficiency of the 
ethical consciousness that appears to lie 
behind the tendency of Ethical Culture 
and similar movements to swing loose from 
religion. It is remarkable how long the 
appeal to authority can maintain itself 
over against empiricism by means of stra- 
tegic retreats. From the infallibility of the 
church, or of dogma, or of the Bible, or of 
the words or the person of Christ, it may 
retreat by way of philosophy into the moral 
consciousness and may imagine that there 
it has something that is infallible. But 
men are more and more coming to realize 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 87 

that the moral consciousness, like every 
other spiritual possession, is a product of 
evolution and education; and if so, that 
we must look for the forces which will sus- 
tain it and secure its further development. 
The moral consciousness is not sufficient to 
itself, as Kant supposed, for the reason that 
it is a thing of growth, which, like all results 
of the growing process, may degenerate, but 
which ought to keep on growing. And just 
because of this lack of self-sufficiency it 
postulates whatever is most favorable for 
its maintenance, vitality, and ceaseless 
growth. 

Thus the ideal of social progress postu- 
lates the Eternal Creative Good Will, not 
as the statue postulates the pedestal — 
simply in order that the qualities which 
unchangeably belong to it may appear in 
their full dignity — but as the fertile soil 
postulates the sun. Just as the fertile soil 
has stored up energies from the sun through 
millenniums of cosmic evolution, so the ideal 
of social progress is the product of countless 
generations of moral evolution, during which 
the human conscience has stored up en- 
ergies from the experience of God. And 
again, just as the fertility of the soil cannot 



88 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

be long maintained, still less increased, 
without being acted upon by the immediate 
light and warmth of the sun, so the ideal of 
social progress can hardly have permanent 
and increasing fruitfulness unless it is cul- 
tivated through being opened up to a pres- 
ent experience of the Eternal Creative Good 
Will. Not that individual men cannot pro- 
mote social progress without a conscious 
experience of God — perhaps more effec- 
tively than some other men who possess 
such an experience. But, even so, such in- 
dividuals draw upon the accumulated social 
effects of man's experience of God, and they 
could accomplish little objective social good 
without the co-operation of great masses of 
men in whom the experience of God is 
working as a positive social force. Cer- 
tainly if the Eternal Creative Good Will be 
a reality, he can work through socially 
minded men who are unable to believe in 
him. But the more we realize that the so- 
cial mind is a hard-won evolutionary and 
educational product, which at the same 
time stands in great need of development 
and expansion among men, the more ra- 
tional it becomes to postulate the validity 
of those ideas and experiences which have 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 89 

proven of the highest value in producing 
the social mind. And that the experience 
of coworking with an Eternal Creative Good 
Will is of the utmost significance for sus- 
taining social progress and promoting dem- 
ocratic ethics we already have shown. 

But, again, the idea of social progress 
postulates a world favorable to its realiza- 
tion, and hence postulates as the dominant 
principle of the world an Eternal Creative 
Good Will. That is to say, social progress 
is not a purely mental matter, as though it 
could be worked out in sermons and uni- 
versity lectures and would be an accom- 
plished fact when these secured the assent 
of men. On the contrary, it is to a very 
important degree a physical matter, in- 
volving the scientific control of nature for 
production, the securing of individual and 
community health, the imparting of forms 
of beauty to physical things, especially to 
useful things and to the physical setting 
of community life, the devising of apparatus 
for research, and the keeping of ethical and 
spiritual development in close relation to 
these other tasks. Now if the physical uni- 
verse is inherently and on the whole as in- 
different or jiostile to the social enterprise 



90 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

as it appears to be, let us say, within 
the arctic and antarctic circles, then social 
progress is a circumscribed and broken 
ideal. Men may resist the encroachments 
of the physical universe as Eskimos raise 
meagre crops at the margins of glaciers or 
build camp-fires to hold back the relentless 
cold. But the odds are overwhelmingly 
against them, and they are foredoomed to 
a slow but sure extinction. But if, on the 
contrary, the dominant principle in the 
world is a Creative Intelligence, working 
out the realization of good and steadily 
devising new good, then the programme of 
social progress is full of hope. It is not 
predestined to succeed, even so, for there 
can be no truly social progress except as 
man has an intelligent will toward progress. 
But the reality on which man is conditioned 
is on the side of his highest ideals and re- 
inforces at every point his efforts for their 
realization. Hence when the idea of social 
progress is taken in its most comprehensive 
and practical meaning, including both an 
upbuilding of the social order and a trans- 
formation of the physical order, it is seen 
to postulate an Eternal Creative Good Will 
as the controlling principle in the universe. 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 91 

This aspect of the postulate of God which 
is contained in the ideal of social progress 
is closer to the thought of Kant than was 
the preceding aspect, yet even here there 
is an important difference that should be 
noted. Kant says that, as beings who are 
bound to obey the moral law in this world, 
we must postulate as Cause of the world a 
Power that is working out moral ends. But 
according to Kant we never get beyond the 
mere postulate, so as to arrive at a real 
experience of this Power. It is as though 
a traveller in a foreign land felt bound to 
assume that his government would protect 
him wherever he went but never could 
have any concrete evidence of the fact, 
nor any real communication with his gov- 
ernment. But, according to the interpre- 
tation that we have reached, in which social 
progress is thought of as the joint achieve- 
ment of man and God, the postulating of 
God should prove to be a means of enter- 
ing into a genuine experience of him. The 
situation is like that of the free citizen who 
postulates a democratic government in re- 
lation to which he may realize his freedom. 
The realization of his own freedom and the 
functioning of his government come to be 



92 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

in constant interaction. So, when one 
postulates God as the underlying force in 
social progress, he thereby anticipates that 
the co-operative action of God will become 
a matter of living experience to him. And 
thus we reach the concluding thought of 
the present discussion, namely, in the fact 
of social progress the postulate of God has 
substantial verification. 

At the present tragic hour in the world's 
history such an argument may seem at 
first sight to excuse us for faltering in our 
religious convictions instead of aiding us 
to stand firm. When society is going pros- 
perously forward there would appear to 
be no better evidence of the reality of God 
than just this fact. But when society has 
been overwhelmed by a cataclysmic war 
we naturally grasp for evidence of God 
outside of human evolution as a means of 
steadying our faith. But in such vital 
questions it is not well to surrender to 
panic; it is better to yield a little ground 
than to suffer our lines to be broken. The 
present crisis calls, not for an abandonment 
of the appeal to actual verification, but for 
a re-examination of the conditions upon 
which the securing of that verification de- 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 93 

pends. When during the construction of 
the great Quebec bridge across the St. 
Lawrence it twice occurred that a long sec- 
tion buckled and fell into the river, the en- 
gineers did not abandon the ruin, but re- 
vised their calculations, and now the bridge 
stands complete and traffic is moving across 
it in security. When the Culebra cut was 
repeatedly filled by huge landslips, the 
Panama Canal was not given up as a fail- 
ure by its engineers; instead, new means 
for removing the obstacles and keeping 
open the great waterway were invented. So 
the verification of the faith in an Eternal 
Creative Good Will which actual social 
progress affords is not now to be abandoned; 
but rather we are to examine more care- 
fully into the conditions of securing that 
verification. 

One condition of securing the verifica- 
tion of the postulate of God through actual 
social progress has often been overlooked, 
but now is becoming increasingly evident. 
It is this : the evidence for God which may 
be secured through his living manifestation 
in social progress is conditioned upon the 
exercise of faith and of creative intelligence 
by man on a democratic scale. Each item 



94 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

in this statement deserves a few words of 
emphasis. 

Faith, actively exercised by man, condi- 
tions the manifestation of God in social 
progress. For, if God aims to make man 
a coworker with him, man must gain some 
vision of the joint task and must experi- 
ence some reaching out for God's co-oper- 
ation and some setting of the will toward 
the great enterprise. An outreach for 
divine fellowship in toiling for an unrealized 
vision of the good — that is faith, and that 
is an attitude on man's part which gives 
the Eternal Creative Good Will a new op- 
portunity. And let it not be objected that 
faith cannot precede evidence, for evidence 
must precede faith. It is not a question 
here of precedence but of organic interac- 
tion. Bodily exercise is conditioned upon 
food, but food can neither be gathered 
nor assimilated without bodily exercise. If 
there has been no manifestation of God in 
the world at all, doubtless we shall be un- 
able to make the venture of faith, but the 
venture of faith is none the less necessary 
for new manifestations of God. 

Creative intelligence in man also condi- 
tions the manifestation of God in social 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 95 

progress. Professor Dewey says that "we 
live forward/' but that our philosophies 
have been chiefly occupied with looking 
backward; hence human development has 
lacked the guidance it should have had and 
has suffered partial arrest. Now, if God is 
creating creators, any failure of men to 
apply their utmost inventive thinking to 
social problems inevitably holds back his 
creative work. The race may, indeed, 
make some progress — slowly, painfully, and 
with much kicking against the goads — 
through being driven forward by God as 
the drover urges on his herd of cattle. 
But what God seeks to do is not to drive 
but to lead, and this requires men who are 
alert to follow God in the expression of 
his Creative Moral Intelligence. Inventive- 
ness in the physical realm has had a won- 
derful development in recent decades, and 
has opened to us a new experience of God's 
reality and purpose. And this suggests to 
us what inventiveness in the moral and 
social realm may accomplish, and what 
may thereby be gained in the way of new 
evidence of God. 

But both faith and creative intelligence 
must now be exercised on a democratic 



96 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

scale, if we are to have that new evidence 
of God which awakens fresh conviction. 
Authority in religion, autocracy in politics 
and industry, academicism in philosophy 
and art set limits to God's work of creating 
creators and so hold back social progress. 
So far as these principles hold sway great 
masses of men are deprived of the living 
evidence of God which comes through per- 
sonal discovery and are offered only that 
which is second-hand. But the true "Chris- 
tian evidences' 9 are never merely second- 
hand. They are of the kind that are re- 
alized in personal experience of sonship to 
God and brotherhood among men, and they 
require the evoking of active faith and of 
creative intelligence in every man. Here 
again we must point out the organic and 
reciprocal relation between the proof and 
the thing proven. If the ethics of democ- 
racy, of moral freedom, and of internation- 
alism is nourished by the consciousness of 
coworking with an Eternal Creative Good 
Will, this consciousness in turn expands and 
gets corroborated in proportion as the ethics 
of democracy, of moral freedom, and of 
internationalism is taken as our guide. In 
proportion as the ethics of privilege gives 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 97 

way to the ethics of progress man's faith 
in God will gain in rational strength. 

But there is plenty of foothold for faith 
in the social progress of the past. The 
backward look gives us much evidence of 
God. It shows us prophetism, by its faith 
in God, maintaining loyalty to righteous- 
ness through the break-up of a nation and 
holding together in the midst of the clash 
of empires a community possessing the 
purest worship and morals that the world 
then knew. It shows us Jesus striking 
out a new type of faith and morals, uni- 
versal in its scope, and capable of so uniting 
itself with the best in Greco-Roman cul- 
ture as to survive the disintegration of the 
ancient order and to furnish the basis for 
what may yet prove to be a world civiliza- 
tion. It shows us the Reformers winning 
for the Western world that liberty of con- 
science necessary for the new developments 
of science and of political life. It shows us 
the Puritan and the Wesleyan movements 
rescuing faith and moral seriousness from 
a smothering worldliness and establishing 
them among the common people. It shows 
us a missionary movement that has at- 
tacked the world's superstition and social 



98 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

stagnation in an ever-broadening campaign 
and has laid the foundations for interna- 
tionalism. It shows us a new social con- 
sciousness, challenging intrenched privilege, 
championing the rights of labor, of the 
propertyless classes, and of women, and 
bent upon securing the widest possible 
sharing of the fruits of production and of 
culture. And these are but the more out- 
standing and consciously religious features 
of social progress, which need to have the 
many achievements of science and politics 
and art interwoven with them in order to 
make a true picture of what God has 
wrought in human society. 

But the forward look opens to us great 
possibilities of new evidence of God. Our 
vision to-day is not the apocalyptic vision 
of the premillennarian, nor the transcen- 
dental vision of the mystic. It is the so- 
berer and yet more warm-hearted social 
vision. It is the vision of the sons of God 
working together with their Eternal Father, 
by science and creative moral intelligence, 
for the building of a better world. It pre- 
sents us a race of men with a new conscious- 
ness of brotherhood, co-operating to abol- 
ish war and translate brotherhood from a 



AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 99 

name into a fact through constructing a 
Federal World Republic. It depicts for 
us woman free to attain her full develop- 
ment and to take her full part in the social 
order. It promises us a solution of the 
industrial question, not through the efforts 
of capital to consolidate its positions and 
extend its intrenchments along the whole 
industrial frontier, nor through labor's ef- 
forts simply to expropriate capital, but 
through the development of industrial de- 
mocracy. It portrays for us a church 
which gives due scope to the manifoldness 
of religious experience and which thereby 
is able to concentrate its moral forces upon 
the real moral issues, to guide moral edu- 
cation, and to make its worship the great 
source for a growing social consciousness 
among men. 

After all, the great proof of God is the 
ever-coming Kingdom of God. And this 
evidence is most fully open to those who 
interpret the moral achievements of the 
past in the light of thoughtful social vision 
for the future, who are striving to realize 
to the full their possibilities for moral crea- 
tivity, and who are seeking to evoke and to 
co-operate with a like creativity in other men. 



100 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

But social progress must take place in 
the midst of the general processes of cosmic 
evolution; and while we already have had 
occasion to describe the postulate which 
the social ideal makes with reference to the 
cosmos as a whole, the validity and mean- 
ing of this postulate require interpretation 
in the light of the general nature of the evo- 
lutionary process. This interpretation will 
be the task of the next lecture. 



Ill 



THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND COSMIC 
EVOLUTION 

To bring these two ideas into relation at 
the present juncture in human affairs may 
seem to be a venturesome task. For cos- 
mic evolution has become again a matter 
of painful ambiguity in its bearing upon 
the religious consciousness. The situation 
is, indeed, not the same as it was fifty years 
ago, when the idea of evolution first gained 
scientific authority through Darwin's Origin 
of Species and wrought such havoc in the 
realm of religious faith. For then the ques- 
tion was not primarily whether there was 
enough good in the world to justify the 
idea of God, but rather it was the question 
whether the good that was here had not 
come about in entirely natural ways, thus 
making the idea of a supernatural source 
for the good unnecessary. Natural selec- 
tion was felt to be entirely hostile to the 

ideas of creation and providence; evolution 

101 



162 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

seemed to leave no room for theism. And 
so for many, as for Romanes, the universe 
"lost its soul of loveliness" and faith be- 
came no longer tenable; while most of those 
who retained their faith felt that the idea 
of evolution was something to be bitterly 
opposed. 

But for our intellectual leadership, and 
to a large extent also for intelligent popular 
thought, this situation has practically dis- 
appeared. In fact, evolution has been in- 
creasingly looked upon as furnishing the 
strongest kind of support for faith. Evo- 
lution, we have been wont to say, is simply 
God's method of revelation. The uniform- 
ity of nature, religious teachers have often 
affirmed, is but the steadfastness of the 
divine character, and physical laws are the 
habits of God. And while Christian theists 
have long since ceased to draw an argument 
from design from the human eye or ear or 
hand, they frequently have claimed that a 
much more adequate and conclusive argu- 
ment from design was to be obtained from 
evolution as a whole. The view that evo- 
lution emphatically supports faith is well 
illustrated by Drummond's Ascent of Man. 
In the closing chapter he says: "Up to this 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 103 

time no word has been spoken to reconcile 
Christianity with evolution, or evolution 
with Christianity. And why? Because 
the two are one. What is evolution? A 
method of creation. What is its object? 
To make more perfect living beings. What 
is Christianity? A method of creation. 
What is its object? To make more per- 
fect living beings. Through what does 
evolution work? Through love. Through 
what does Christianity work? Through 
love. Evolution and Christianity have 
the same Author, the same end, the same 
spirit. 5 ' * So John Fiske, in his Through Na- 
ture to God, argues that evolution establishes 
"the everlasting reality of religion," and 
representative Christian ministers, like Ly- 
man Abbott or Newman Smythe, find in 
evolution the basis for their theism. 

But the Great War has brought about a 
new tension between the idea of evolution 
and faith in God. This new tension springs 
not from the irreconcilability between evolu- 
tionary law and supernatural creation but 
from the clash between the actual facts of 
evolution and the idea that the cosmos is 
realizing a moral purpose. How can evolu- 

*P. 342. 



104 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

tion be in any sense the work of God when 
it results in anything so palpably irrational 
and so colossally hideous as this war? 
We do not call it moral progress when the 
building up of a great fortune ends in 
wholesale waste and debauchery on the part 
of its possessors. In what sense can moral 
progress be claimed for a civilization which 
can issue in such a debacle as is now tak- 
ing place, in which the human race is 
slaughtering or deforming its toilers by the 
million, squandering the fruits of a cen- 
tury's toil, and dooming untold numbers of 
its little ones to a burdened and enfeebled 
existence ? Can these things take place in 
a world in which a God is in control ? Such 
are some of the questions about the rela- 
tion of cosmic evolution to religious faith 
which are irresistibly raised by the present 
world calamity. 

Now this situation is being met in two 
different ways that have an important 
bearing on the conclusions to which we 
came in our preceding discussion; for they 
lead, in the one instance to a complete, and 
in the other to a partial, abandonment of 
the postulate of God, which we found to be 
bound up with the ideal of social progress. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 105 

The first way is that of those who say 
that the war, like everything else, is a 
product of blind cosmic forces. It was 
made absolutely necessary, they hold, by 
the conformation of the planet on which 
we live, by the "pressure of race proto- 
plasm,' 5 and by the struggle for existence 
between antagonistic cultures. Its issues 
are not those of right and wrong but those 
of an inevitable conflict between rights. 
One brilliant American exponent of this 
interpretation of the war sums up considera- 
tions like these by taking Phillips Brooks's 
phrase, "Nothing that ought not to be 
need be," and transmuting it into "Noth- 
ing that ought not to be can be." 1 In 
other words, whatever happens should be 
accepted as what ought to happen, because 
nothing else was possible. Now this view 
entirely excludes the faith in an Eternal 
Creative Good Will, and for that reason, 
as we note, it reverts to the aristocratic, 
deterministic, nationalistic type of ethics. 
Thus we get indirect testimony to our con- 
clusion that the ethics of democracy, moral 
freedom, and internationalism really does 
postulate an Eternal Creative Good Will. 

1 H. H. Powers, The Things Men Fight for, p. 364. 



106 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

But what is of importance for us now is that 
this view challenges us to consider directly 
the nature of cosmic evolution, in order to 
see whether it admits of any real postulate 
of God. 

The other way of meeting our present 
spiritual situation is that of Mr. H. G. 
Wells, who brings forward the doctrine of 
a finite God. Mr. Wells fully identifies 
himself with the ethics of progress as over 
against the ethics of privilege, and he does 
not desire to leave that ethics with the 
fragile support of a vague tendency in things 
or a panpsychism without a God, as the 
Ethical Culture thinkers have done. Hence 
he affirms a definite God who is more than 
the sum of humanity, but finite. But as for 
the postulate of God as the immanent con- 
trolling force in cosmic evolution, he holds 
that to be not only unjustifiable in the light 
of the facts, but also unnecessary and un- 
desirable. 

These two ways of reacting upon our 
present intellectual and moral perplexity 
furnish the questions for our concluding 
discussion. Is the experience of God as 
an Eternal Creative Good Will corroborated 
or discredited by cosmic evolution? And 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 107 

does the idea of God as the immanent con- 
trolling force in cosmic evolution enhance 
or impair the vital value of the experience 
of God for modern life ? 



The question whether the experience of 
God is corroborated or discredited by cosmic 
evolution is the question whether or not 
cosmic evolution gives evidence of being the 
manifestation of a comprehensive purpose. 
Does cosmic evolution, we must proceed to 
ask, eliminate the idea of a comprehensive 
purpose in the universe, or is it more ade- 
quately interpreted by means of that idea ? 

Now if one begins with the more ele- 
mentary cosmic problems and reviews the 
stages of the evolutionary process up to the 
problems that are most intricate, with the 
expectation that at one or more points 
nothing but the idea of a divine purpose 
will serve as an explanation, one is destined 
to be disappointed in his expectations. In 
astronomy La Place found the hypothe- 
sis of a God unnecessary when he had 
worked out the application of the laws 
of mechanical evolution. In biology Dar- 



108 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

win eliminated the appeal to a Great De- 
signer when he established the principle of 
natural selection. In physiology Huxley, 
on the basis of evolution, came to regard 
even human consciousness as an epiphenom- 
enon. In ethics Clifford, by evolutionary 
reasoning, substituted for the doctrine that 
conscience is the voice of God the explana- 
tion that it springs from the tribal con- 
science of primitive man. And in politics 
our political scientists explain the state, 
not from the divine right of kings, but from 
sovereignties established and maintained by 
military force. 

And in general one must admit that the 
substitution of an evolutionary explanation 
for the direct appeal to a divine purpose is 
valid; for the appeal to a divine purpose as 
a scientific explanation means a breach in 
the continuity of nature, whereas it is only 
through the discovery of continuity that 
we can effect the accurate adjustment to 
our environment and control over its events 
which is the object of science. 

But suppose that we begin with our 
present universe, which we can concretely 
know, instead of with a past universe which 
we can only abstractly know, and suppose 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 109 

that we seek to trace the continuity of the 
universe backward instead of forward. We 
shall then find that the purposive principle 
is indispensable for an adequate under- 
standing of our universe, and that the work- 
ing of this principle can be traced, if not 
throughout the cosmic process, at least very- 
far back in its course. 

First of all, we see at work in our present 
universe, as a significant factor in its evo- 
lution, a co-operative social intelligence. 
This is of course obscured by the present 
war, but the tragedy of the war centres pre- 
cisely in the fact that it to so large a degree 
suspends the co-operative social thinking 
which was becoming more and more a force 
in human affairs. There is, for example, 
co-operative social thinking in the ranks 
of labor — thinking in terms of trades, of 
organized industries, of internationalism. 
If the latter phase of this thinking broke 
down with the war, that is no more than 
must be admitted, so far as practical con- 
trol is concerned, of every other force for 
internationalism; and this internationalism 
of labor remains as an important basis for 
reconstruction, since the democracy for 
which we are fighting is destined to be an 



110 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

industrial democracy. There is co-opera- 
tive social thinking, too, in the ranks of 
capital, for the most intelligent capitalism 
thinks, not simple in terms of money, but 
in terms of populations and their needs. 
The advance of political democracy around 
the globe is another evidence of co-operative 
social intelligence. Science is to a large 
degree a conscious application of the same 
principle. The Christian religion, with its 
ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth and 
its application of this ideal in morals, in 
philanthropy, and in missions, furnishes — 
in spite of all divisive tendencies — the most 
significant example of all. 

Now this co-operative social intelligence 
is actually transforming this planet, and so 
is a positive force in the physical evolution 
of the cosmos. It has given the earth a 
nervous system through the telegraph, the 
telephone, the ocean cable, the wireless 
apparatus. It has given the earth a mus- 
cular system by means of the machinery of 
manufacturing, and a circulatory system by 
means of the machinery of transportation. 
It has increased the fertility of the earth 
by irrigation, drainage, conservation of 
resources, and scientific sanitation. And 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 111 

it is even finding out how to increase the 
beauty of the earth by adding to the charm 
of witness the charm of ordered grace. 
The wsiole earth may almost be said to 
be in process of becoming literally alive 
through the work of co-operative social in- 
telligence. 

But more important than this : it is upon 
co-operative social intelligence that all fu- 
ture social evolution now turns. Mankind 
apparently has gotten about as far as it can 
by mere unconscious social evolution. We 
now see that the Superman cannot arise 
without the Super-race, and that the ge- 
niuses that are to contribute most to the 
progress of the world will be those who 
have a genius for democracy. The old 
principle of individual intelligence work- 
ing unaided, or apparently so, must give 
way to the principle of co-operative social 
intelligence, if evolution is to continue to 
unfold new and higher modes of existence. 

But the next step in tracing backward the 
continuity of purposiveness in the universe 
is to note that this co-operative social in- 
telligence which is now in process of forma- 
tion is conditioned upon a long evolution of 
mind — and by mind I mean, not any psychic 



112 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

activity whatever, but conscious thinking 
and purposeful action. One great factor 
in evolution, no doubt, is mere unconscious 
pressure, like the movement of a glacier 
down a mountain under the weight of 
the constantly accumulating snow and ice 
above. But a still more vital factor is the 
thinking and the purposeful action w T hich 
are illustrated by the building of the funicu- 
lar railway to the mountain-top. Conscious 
wants, the effort to surmount difficulties, 
and the invention of means for so doing — 
these are factors without which evolution 
as we know it could not have proceeded, 
and without which of course no co-operative 
social intelligence would ever have been 
possible. The long but dramatic story of 
the transition from the first movement of 
savage curiosity, the first tool, the first 
articulate word, the first picture writing, 
the first feeling of the tribal conscience, to 
the laboratory, the airplane, the address 
that sways a nation, the great charters of 
democracy, and the conscientious thinking 
for humanity — this story is now worked 
out in its main features, and it establishes 
mind as an element of prime importance in 
the process of evolution. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 113 

But we must take another step in trac- 
ing back the continuity of purposiveness in 
the universe. In the age-long evolution 
through which natural selection has led up 
to mind the most significant element has 
been psychic selection. By psychic selec- 
tion I mean the reaction upon environment 
which is made possible by sensation and 
instinct, and which works long before any- 
thing like intelligent selection comes in. 
We say that natural selection explains the 
development of the eye, but we should not 
forget that the eye — from the first pigment 
spot sensitive to light to the eye of man — 
is a selective organ that in turn explains 
natural selection, and that its efficacy is 
due to psychic activity. And so with every 
other aspect of organic development. A 
vital element everywhere is the awareness 
of environment which appears in sensation 
and the useful reaction which depends upon 
instinct. How far back this psychic selec- 
tion can be traced is of course undeter- 
mined, but the psychic activity of micro- 
organisms is one of the most significant lines 
of present biological inquiry. What con- 
cerns us here, however, is that so far back 
as this psychic selection can be traced there 



114 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

is no breach in the continuity of purposive- 
ness in the universe. 

But here we shall almost certainly be met 
by an objection. Is not reasoning like 
this, it will be protested, destined to be 
nullified by the opposite tendency of biolog- 
ical science to extend the mechanical ex- 
planation of phenomena into every field of 
its inquiry ? Suppose that a chemical origin 
of life can be found, and the chemical ex- 
planation of physiological functions con- 
tinues to make progress, will not then the 
principle of purposiveness be i undermined 
and the mechanical theory of evolution be 
sure of triumph? 

For answer I must borrow an argument 
from L. T. Hobhouse's important work on 
Development and Purpose. Professor Hob- 
house argues that, so far from the tele- 
ological explanation being superseded by the 
mechanical, the mechanical explanation, as 
it is elaborated, tends to pass over into the 
teleological. Let me adapt freely one of 
his illustrations to bring out his thought. 
A machine is characterized by the mutual 
indifference of its parts, and gets its unity 
and coherence only from some principle 
outside itself. Hence if one part breaks 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 115 

down the rest go pounding on till they too 
are broken and the whole comes to a stop. 
Not so with an organism. When one part 
is injured the other parts instantly begin to 
co-operate for its repair. Or, if a part is 
subjected to special strain, it is soon thick- 
ened up by aid of the rest of the organ- 
ism so that it can stand the strain. So 
likewise an organism provides by nutrition 
against its own wear and tear and by re- 
production even against its own death. In 
short, an organism is a sympathetic whole 
the parts of which instantaneously co-oper- 
ate for its own maintenance and develop- 
ment. 

But suppose we expand the mechanical 
explanation to cover the case of the organ- 
ism, as we may legitimately try to do. We 
may add a governor to our machine, as in 
the case of the engine, or compensating 
devices against fluctuations in temperature, 
as in the chronometer. Let us imagine 
that we could continue adding such com- 
pensating and regulating devices until the 
machine could secure its own maintenance 
and growth. Have we then displaced teleol- 
ogy by mechanism ? On the contrary, says 
Hobhouse, we have passed through mechan- 



116 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

ism to teleology. Our machine has become 
an organism. For, instead of being charac- 
terized by the mutual indifference of its 
parts, which is of the essence of the machine, 
it is characterized by instantaneous sympa- 
thetic co-operation of its parts for the main- 
tenance of the whole, which is of the essence 
of the organism. The teleology which we 
see in an organism is, of course, not the tele- 
ology of an external designer. It is an imma- 
nent teleology, in which an organism secures 
its own maintenance and growth — not neces- 
sarily through any prevision of these ends, 
but simply through an awareness of its own 
inherent causal tendency. But what is a 
purpose even in human experience? It is 
never a complete prevision of results. "The 
purposive state of our experience, 55 says 
Hobhouse, "is a process moving under the 
control of the idea of its own causal ten- 
dency. 5 ' 1 Thus a completely self -regulat- 
ing machine is nothing more or less than an 
organism, and explanation by mechanism 
passes over into explanation by purpose. 
Let chemical and mechanical explanations 
of life and its functions be extended to the 
limit, they still cannot eliminate the reality 

1 Op. cit., p. 319. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 117 

of that purposiveness in the universe, the 
continuity of which we have been tracing. 

But now, having traced purposiveness in 
the universe from co-operative social in- 
telligence in humanity back to the rudi- 
mentary psychic selection in the simplest 
organisms, what shall we say of the process 
as a whole ? And what shall we say of the 
inorganic world, where no psychic functions 
are experimentally discoverable? The an- 
swer of Hobhouse to this general problem 
will help us to define our own answer. 

Hobhouse argues that reality as a whole 
so far possesses an organic character as to 
lead us to postulate a Central Mind. 
"If," he says, "a purpose runs through the 
world-whole, there is a Mind of which the 
world purpose is the object. Such a Mind 
must be a permanent and central factor in 
the process of Reality, but how in detail 
its relation to reality in general, and the 
individual mind in particular, is to be con- 
ceived is a question about which it is best 
frankly to confess ignorance." 1 But not- 
withstanding our need of confessing igno- 
rance Hobhouse claims— I quote his words — 
"not in the least as a matter of faith, but 

1 Op. cit, p. 365. 



118 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

as a sound working hypothesis, that the 
evolutionary process can best be under- 
stood as the effect of a purpose slowly work- 
ing itself out under limiting conditions which 
it brings successively under control." 1 

But we must heed especially Hobhouse's 
view of these "limiting conditions " under 
which he conceives the Central Mind to be 
working. They consist of whatever has 
not as yet been organized into the harmoni- 
ous expression of purpose, and they may be 
subdivided into two classes: on the one 
hand, the partial purposive processes which 
clash with each other, and on the other 
hand, processes of mere blind mechanism 
— which is "the antithesis of purpose." 
Out of these limiting conditions Hobhouse 
gets his explanation of evil: physical evil 
being "the outcome of the blind operation 
of mechanical forces," and moral evil be- 
ing "the result of the pursuit of partial ends 
without regard to the effect on others." 2 
And so Hobhouse holds that the Central 
Mind "must neither be confused with the 
whole of things nor with an Omnipotent 
Creator of things," 3 but must be regarded 
as developing in the midst of reality. 

1 Op. cit., p. xxvi. 2 Op. cit., p. 368. 3 Op. cit., p. 367. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 119 

Thus we see that the Central Mind, as 
Hobhouse conceives it, is a finite God, and 
so is formally akin to the doctrine of H. G. 
Wells, which we are to take up as the last 
topic of our discussion. Nevertheless, Hob- 
house's idea is founded on such different 
reasoning and is so much wider in its scope 
that it requires separate consideration, and 
by considering it on its own merits we shall 
be aided to the next step in our thought. 

The reasonableness of the idea of a Cen- 
tral Mind we already had given evidence 
for in tracing the continuity of purposive- 
ness in the universe from co-operative social 
intelligence back to primitive psychic se- 
lection. And while the evidence does not 
constitute an independent philosophical 
basis for faith — a basis worked out inde- 
pendently of religious experience after the 
manner of natural theology— it does furnish 
an important corroboration for faith. Cer- 
tainly if we can go so far as to say that the 
reality of a Central Mind is a sound working 
hypothesis for the interpretation of evolu- 
tion, that gives support to the religious 
experience of coworking with an Eternal 
Creative Good Will. But further, in view 
of the reality and magnitude of evil in the 



120 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

world, especially as revealed so appallingly 
in this war, it seems inevitable that we 
should recognize the Central Mind to be 
working under limiting conditions. But 
the important question remains: are these 
limiting conditions such as are inherent in 
the nature of the world purpose, or are 
they in part entirely external to that pur- 
pose? Certain limitations — and very mo- 
mentous ones — are inherent in a world 
purpose that is moral and social and that 
is to be realized by an evolutionary process. 
Such conditions are meant by Hobhouse 
when he speaks of partial purposive proc- 
esses not yet organized into harmony. 
But when he speaks of limiting conditions 
due to blind mechanism operating in an 
entirely unorganized way, of course these 
must be thought of as wholly external to 
the world purpose- Now I believe it can 
be shown that this latter interpretation of 
the limiting conditions which exist for the 
Central Mind is philosophically unneces- 
sary, and that, if it be retained, it makes 
the idea of a Central Mind religiously in- 
sufficient. While if we can recognize the 
limiting conditions as all being inherent in 
the world purpose, the idea of a Central 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 121 

Mind unqualifiedly serves our religious 
needs. For we can then think of the en- 
tire process of cosmic evolution as being 
controlled by an Eternal Creative Good 
Will. 

In considering this question of whether 
there are in the world mechanical processes 
wholly external to any purpose we cannot 
afford to ignore Bergson's doctrine of Crea- 
tive Evolution. Bergson regards mecha- 
nism, not with Hobhouse as a realm of re- 
ality originally unrelated to evolutionary 
forces, nor with the naturalistic philosopher 
as the real nature of evolution, but simply 
as an aspect of the evolutionary process, 
which in its deeper nature is a Creative Life. 
For example, one who simply looks at a 
motion picture of a runner gets merely the 
mechanical equivalent of the reality by 
means of a swift succession of static 
photographs; but the runner himself, do- 
ing his hundred-yards dash, experiences the 
creative energies of reality in its fulness. 
So one who examines an inventor's blue- 
prints perceives only a static and mechan- 
ical aspect of the real inventive process; 
whereas the inventor himself, experiment- 
ing, rejecting, devising, is in the real stream 



122 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

of creative evolution. Or once more, the 
musical score is only a mechanical repre- 
sentation of a symphony; but the com- 
poser, as he originates the symphony, or the 
orchestra as it renders it, embodies the 
vital creative impulses to which all evolu- 
tion is due. 

Thus, according to Bergson's view, 
mechanism is incapable of representing any 
portion of reality in its fulness. For cer- 
tain practical purposes, indeed, we rightly 
make great use of the principle of mecha- 
nism. It helps us to grasp facts in the mass, 
to deal with them swiftly, to effect new 
groupings and combinations — just as a 
commander-in-chief handles his army as one 
mass, makes it mobile, reorganizes it, by 
mathematics. But as the commander-in- 
chief cannot safely forget that his army is 
after all made up of striving and suffering 
human beings, so we cannot wisely regard 
any portion of reality as mere mechanism. 
On the contrary, from Bergson's standpoint 
all reality is included in one eternal process 
of creative evolution, of which God is the 
inexhaustible source. "God/ 5 says Berg- 
son, "is incessant life, action, liberty"; 
and he is the centre from which the re- 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 123 

ality of the universe is continually leaping 
forth. 1 

Now these features of Bergson's concep- 
tion of evolution aid us in interpreting the 
limiting conditions under which, in view of 
the reality of evil, we must think of God 
as working. For on the basis of Bergson's 
doctrine there are no limiting conditions 
outside of the creative process, and yet 
within the creative process there are limit- 
ing conditions of a very real nature. Such 
conditions are — if we may introduce a 
classification of our own here — first, new 
finite creative processes, relatively separate 
and not yet harmonized; second, the re- 
sults of past creative activities, which must 
be more fully organized; third, processes 
of disintegration needing to be neutralized. 
Each of these kinds of limitation may be 
illustrated, for the sake of clearness, from 
the human realm. 

The new and unharmonized creative 
processes have a palpable illustration in the 
rival modern cultures — Anglo-Saxon, Teu- 
ton, Latin, Slavic — each having certain 
merits and yet each endangered for lack 
of integration with the others. And we 

1 U Evolution Crtatrice, p. 270. 



124 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

must admit that such rivalry of cultures is 
hardly preventable where co-operative social 
intelligence is only midway in the course of 
its development. The results of past cre- 
ative activities needing fuller organization 
are illustrated wherever within a given 
group the problem of social education is an 
urgent one, as it is in the case of the con- 
flicts of capital and labor. And the dis- 
integrations needing to be neutralized are 
apparent wherever older forms of social 
control — those of the tribe or of the back- 
ward civilization — are breaking down be- 
fore modern civilization, and the social 
order is in danger of becoming poisoned 
through slavery, political or industrial, or 
through new forms of vice. 

Now these examples, though taken from 
the human realm, illustrate processes that 
are traceable all the way back along the 
course of creative evolution to the most 
rudimentary beginnings. The rivalry of 
cultures, taken lower down in the scale, is 
the mere struggle for existence between 
groups and types. Nor does a point like 
this mean the recognition of the blind strug- 
gle for existence as omnipotent, for in a 
process of creative evolution new and 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 125 

higher forces are to be recognized as appear- 
ing along the way. We are interpreting 
the lower stages of evolution by the higher, 
instead of the higher by the lower, but a 
continuity between all the stages must also 
be recognized. In like manner the need 
for fuller organization, in order that a type 
or group may assimilate its past gains, is 
apparent all through evolution wherever 
the principle of correlation comes in — as 
for instance in the correlation between the 
use of weapons and tools by primitive man 
and his acquiring an erect posture. So, 
too, the need of neutralizing processes of 
disintegration appears wherever parasitic 
forms of life develop. 

Now the features of the evolutionary 
process which we have just been tracing 
constitute limitations upon the realization 
of the world purpose, and yet they are 
necessary conditions on which the realiza- 
tion of that purpose depends. They are 
inherent in the creative evolutionary proc- 
ess itself, and so are germane to the world 
purpose which gives the whole process its 
meaning. Thus the dualism of Hobhouse's 
view — due to his regarding mechanism as 
originally a realm external to the working 



126 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

of the Central Mind— is avoided, and yet 
a no less genuine explanation of the occur- 
rence of evil in the evolutionary pr ess is 
gained. ; \l 

But while we have turned to Bergson for 
the point of view which best enables us to 
understand the limiting conditions involved 
in God's creative work, there is a central 
characteristic of his doctrine which chal- 
lenges criticism on the basis of the inter- 
pretation we are working out. Bergson, 
while eliminating the dualism just referred 
to, admits into his thinking a dualism of 
another kind, which is liable to serious con- 
sequences. This is the dualism between 
intelligence and intuition. Intelligence, in 
Bergson's doctrine, is backward-looking; 
it analyzes facts for practical purposes 
and then organizes them into mechanical 
schemes. It is intuition that is forward- 
looking and that makes us aware of the 
pulsing reality of evolution. Now while 
Bergson holds that both the view of reality 
given by intelligence and that given by 
intuition must be taken into account in 
making up a total philosophy, yet he does 
not combine intuition and intelligence into 
a unified function of the human mind. But 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 127 

just such a combination is needed for the 
understanding of evolution. It is creative 
intelli nee to which evolution leads up, 
and iu is upon a further achievement of 
creative intelligence that any further for- 
ward movement of evolution depends. And 
it is the absence of a clearly unified concep- 
tion of creative intelligence, in man and in 
the life of the universe, that leads Leuba 
and others to regard Bergson's conception 
of God as that of a non-purposive Creative 
Force. What Bergson's system may grow 
into we do not know, but it certainly seems 
to be severely handicapped by the dualism 
which he has left between intuition and 
intelligence. 

How now shall we summarize our thought 
under this first topic? To what extent 
have we found cosmic evolution corroborat- 
ing the religious consciousness of coworking 
with an Eternal Creative Good Will ? 

We have traced the evidence for a world 
purpose from the co-operative social in- 
telligence at work in human society, back 
through the evolution of mind, back through 
psychic selection in its more rudimentary 
forms, to the inorganic world. And we 
have found the hypothesis that the in- 



128 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

organic world, so-called, is really the mani- 
festation of an inexhaustible Creative Life 
to be preferable philosophically to the hy- 
pothesis that it is a realm of mechanism 
originally external to the Central Life or 
Mind. To such an interpretation of the 
cosmos we may give the name of evolu- 
tionary theism. Now the prime signifi- 
cance of evolutionary theism lies in the 
synthesis which it makes between the idea 
of a world purpose and the need of recogniz- 
ing limiting conditions. This synthesis con- 
sists in the recognition of limiting conditions 
which really retard, or temporarily defeat 
the world purpose, and which nevertheless 
are inherent in the nature of that purpose 
and necessary for its realization. How 
important this synthesis is we already have 
seen from the consequences which follow 
from its absence. In the preceding lecture 
we saw that panpsychism without a God 
tended to support an aristocratic, deter- 
ministic, nationalistic ethics instead of the 
ethics of democracy, moral freedom, and 
internationalism, and in the present dis- 
cussion we have seen that the doctrine of a 
Central Mind in evolution, if combined 
with the view that there is a realm of pure 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 129 

mechanism, results in an unsatisfactory 
dualism. But evolutionary theism makes 
it possible for us to avoid both these errors, 
because it helps us to conceive of a demo- 
cratic world purpose which is being pro- 
gressively reached by a continuous process 
of cosmic evolution through limiting con- 
ditions which are bound up with the very 
nature of that purpose. 

An illustration of the way in which, in 
evolutionary theism, the world purpose and 
the limiting conditions are interrelated may 
serve to bring out the conclusion at which 
we have arrived. Let us suppose a modern 
educator who combined the largest ideals of 
democratic education with the highest ad- 
ministrative efficiency to be placed in charge 
of the educational system of the teeming 
millions in China and to be given unlimited 
political power and financial resources. 
His purpose would include responsible par- 
ticipation in the national life on the part of 
every Chinese from the lowest coolie to the 
highest mandarin. But his purpose could 
be accomplished only by a long process 
of evolution, and notwithstanding the full 
political powers given him and his unlimited 
financial resources, he would be subject to 



130 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

many limiting conditions, due to the fact 
that the Chinese themselves were at so 
many different stages of development, and 
that each stage was necessarily connected 
with every other stage. Many hindrances 
and positive evils would result from these 
limiting conditions, and yet they are not 
conditions foreign to the purpose of the 
educator but are inherent in its very nature. 
So on the basis of evolutionary theism the 
Central Mind is conditioned at each point 
in evolution by the stages that have gone 
before and that coexist, and by the increas- 
ing spontaneity of individual centres of 
life; and yet without such conditions his 
purpose could not be accomplished. To 
take a specific instance, God can hardly be 
thought of as eliminating by miracle what- 
ever germ life becomes parasitic to the 
human body and causes disease, just as 
fast as that may occur. That is not con- 
ceivable if his purpose is one that needs 
to be accomplished through evolution and 
through moral development. Such an elim- 
ination he is indeed seeking to make. 
Diseases are not to be accepted passively 
as visitations of providence or as mysteri- 
ous disciplines. But the elimination must 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 131 

evidently come through increase of human 
intelligence and co-operation and mastery 
over environment. And yet, just as we 
believe that education for democracy is a 
workable ideal for the Chinese, so we may 
believe that cosmic evolution can be brought 
forward to the realization of democratic 
ethics in all human relations, to a federal 
world republic in which human brother- 
hood is the controlling ideal, to an establish- 
ment of the Kingdom of God on earth. 

It must be made plain, however, that 
faith is indispensable for this interpreta- 
tion, just as it is for religious experience in 
its more specific sense — not a faith that flies 
in the face of the facts, nor that arbitrarily 
cuts loose from the facts, but a faith that, 
candidly reviewing the facts, clings to the 
principle that the facts can be combined 
with the great values — either by construc- 
tive thinking or constructive moral living. 
Our interpretation of cosmic evolution, 
then, is not an underpinning for faith, such 
as natural theology claimed to furnish, 
without which the whole structure of the 
religious life would fall to pieces. Nor is it 
a palace of philosophic truth such as Hegel 
sought to erect, to replace the provisional 



132 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

shelters that faith had provided. It is 
rather like the clothes that a working human 
being needs to wear in a rugged world. 
If the world of our experience were all a 
tropical zone, where ideals could live with- 
out effort, faith might not need to provide 
itself with a protective clothing of theory. 
But since the world of our experience is 
more like the northerly climate, where ideals 
must live by toil, where seasons change and 
tempests come, the protective clothing of a 
working theory of the universe must be 
formed by faith for the sake of its own 
health and efficiency. 

II 

H. G. Wells, however, in his recent writ- 
ings has vigorously challenged the view 
which we have been developing, and, since 
his thinking in many respects reflects the 
modern situation, we need to measure our 
argument by his challenge. Moreover, he 
approaches the subject from the side of 
social and spiritual values instead of through 
an analysis and interpretation of an evolu- 
tionary process, such as Hobhouse and 
Bergson give, and so his position will give 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 133 

us an opportunity for testing our argument 
in the realm of values — which for religious 
experience must always be the highest 
court of appeal. At the beginning of this 
lecture we formulated, on the basis of Mr. 
Wells's position, the question, Does the 
idea of God as the immanent controlling 
force in cosmic evolution enhance or im- 
pair the vital value of the experience of God 
for modern life? and to that question we 
now directly turn. 

It is, indeed, legitimate, with reference 
to the argument that we have been making, 
to raise the question whether any theory of 
cosmic evolution is not bound to be too 
heavily weighted by the facts of evil to be 
able to give support to the experience of 
God. And if such a theory in the last 
analysis is a matter of faith instead of 
demonstration, one may be disposed to ask: 
"Why not unload it altogether?" It is 
possible to increase one's protective cloth- 
ing until it becomes more like a suit of 
antiquated armor than a means to the 
health and efficiency of ideals. To Mr. 
Wells this appears to be not only a possi- 
bility but a fatal necessity, whenever the 
experience of God seeks to take up any posi- 



134 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

tive interpretation whatever of the cosmic 
process as a whole. Let us turn for a 
moment to his own statement of the matter. 

The God we need, Mr. Wells affirms, is a 
finite God, definitely personal, whom we 
know as we know a friend. He had a be- 
ginning in time, but he is immortal. He is 
courage, he is youth, he is austere love. 
He hopes and attempts, and gains his ends, 
not by passive suffering and non-resistance, 
but by fighting. His supreme goal is the 
conquest of death — "first/ 5 says Mr. Wells, 
"the overcoming of death in the individual 
by the incorporation of the motives of his 
life in an undying purpose, and then the 
defeat of that death that seems to threaten 
our species upon a cooling planet beneath a 
cooling sun. 5 ' * 

Now of such a God Mr. Wells holds that 
we may have an actual experience, and all 
do have an experience of him who par- 
ticipate in genuinely modern religion. But 
this experience has nothing whatever to 
do with any theory of the universe and 
should be kept entirely distinct from all 
such theories. God, he says, is the God 
of the heart, not the God of the universe. 

1 God the Invisible King, p. 99. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 135 

He is not the ultimate ground of reality. 
"The ultimate of existence/' declares Wells, 
"is a Veiled Being, which seems to know 
nothing of life or death or good or ill." 1 
Nor is God "the Life Force," of which 
Wells speaks as a "second Being" and 
"the maker of our world." "This heat 
and haste and wrath of life," "this Demi- 
urge," seems to be both good and evil. 
"If it gives all the pain and conflict of life, 
it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the 
delight and hope of youth, the pleasures." 
But in any case it is not God. So far is 
God from being identifiable with either the 
Veiled Being or the Life Force that he 
must be thought of as having originated 
with man. "Somewhere," says Mr. Wells, 
"in the dawning of mankind he had a be- 
ginning, an awakening, and ... as man- 
kind grows he grows." And again — "He 
is the undying human memory, the in- 
creasing human will." 2 

And yet Mr. Wells will not admit that 
his idea of God makes him only the collec- 
tive mind and purpose of the race. He in- 
sists that God is more than the sum of the 
best in mankind, and is a real Being in 

1 Op. cit, p. 14. 2 0y. cit, p. 61. 



136 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

himself, just as a temple is more than a 
gathering of stones, or an organism more 
than an aggregate of cells. Hence his 
position is different from a mere devotion to 
ethical and social ideals to which Ethical 
Culture in the official sense of the term 
limits itself, in that he lays the utmost stress 
upon a clear experience of a personal God, 
however limited the application of that 
experience to the world of reality may be. 

Now if this doctrine of Mr, Wells be the 
true interpretation of the experience of 
God in modern life, then we have been 
utterly astray in seeking to bring out a 
relation between that experience and the 
idea of cosmic evolution. The experience 
of God can only be compromised and per- 
verted by establishing such a relation — as 
it has been in the past, according to this 
author, by the Christian doctrines of crea- 
tion and providence and by the whole trend 
of Christian theology. But no such doc- 
trine can be accepted solely because of the 
zeal and enthusiasm with which it is set 
forth, nor yet because it is developed in re- 
action against limitations in the Christian 
doctrines of the past, which must be ad- 
mitted to be very real when judged from 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 137 

the standpoint of modern needs. We are 
bound, therefore, to ask whether either the 
idea of an experience of God or the needs 
of modern life are rightly interpreted by the 
doctrine of a God so decidedly finite as Mr. 
Wells represents him to be. 

There are two fundamental objections to 
Mr. Wells's doctrine; and the first is that 
the metaphysics of nature and the meta- 
physics of humanity cannot be sharply 
separated, as he assumes- He frequently 
writes, to be sure, as if his views involved 
no metaphysics whatever, but were the 
product of pure experience alone. "Mod- 
ern religion/' he says, "bases its knowledge 
of God and its account of God entirely 
upon experience. It has encountered God. 
It does not argue about God; it relates." 1 
And we may freely grant that a genuine 
experience of God is at the heart of the posi- 
tion that he has developed. A single pas- 
sage illustrating this should in justice be 
quoted: "Then suddenly, in a little while, 
in his own time, God comes. This cardinal 
experience is an undoubting, immediate 
sense of God. It is the attainment of an 
absolute certainty that one is not alone in 

1 Op. tit., p. 20. 



138 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

one's self. It is as if one were touched at 
every point by a being akin to one's self, 
sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, stead- 
fast and pure in aim. It is completer and 
more intimate, but it is like standing side 
by side with and touching some one that 
we love very dearly and trust completely." 1 
But this immediate experience receives a 
speculative interpretation at the hands of 
Mr. Wells as truly as the Christian experi- 
ence has been given a speculative interpre- 
tation by theology. Only Mr. Wells would 
fain have simply a metaphysics of human- 
ity. His God is the concrete organic unity 
of the best part of mankind, and he re- 
pudiates the idea of a God of the Universe. 
But the whole trend of modern scientific 
thinking leads us to recognize the unity 
between man and nature, so that apart 
from the metaphysics of nature there can 
be no metaphysics of humanity. And this 
fact Mr. Wells involuntarily bears witness 
to when he speaks of God as originating with 
mankind, claims immortality for him, and 
assigns him the task of conquering that 
great death of the race which is in store for 
it because it dwells "upon a cooling planet 

1 Op. cit., p. 23. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 139 

beneath a cooling sun." Such ideas really 
require a positive and extensive connection 
between the conception of God and that of 
cosmic evolution — a requirement that can- 
not be evaded simply by ignoring the con- 
ception of evolution, as Mr. Wells so gen- 
erally does. Indeed, by interpreting God 
only as the concrete unity of the best part 
of mankind his conception of God has be- 
come so finite that it is left without protec- 
tion against two dangers — on the one hand 
the danger that it shall become absorbed 
into the type of religion which is only an- 
other name for ethics; and on the other the 
danger that to the average mind it shall 
come to stand only for a national or racial 
god — identified with a single national or 
racial culture. 

But one to whom Mr. Wells's idea of a 
finite God seems emancipating may ob- 
ject that the God to whom the present dis- 
cussion has pointed, even though immanent 
in cosmic evolution, is also finite. This 
we should have to grant if the term "in- 
finite" were to be used in a merely abstract 
logical sense, meaning the absence of all 
limiting conditions of whatever nature. In 
such an Infinite, it is true, the experience of 



140 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

God in modern life has no interest. But 
this experience is vitally interested that 
God should be infinite in the pragmatic 
sense of the term — that is, adequate for the 
practical solution of all our finite problems. 
Surely men who in this scientific age are 
consciously dealing with the universal laws 
of nature need a God who is infinite in the 
sense of being able to control those laws 
to moral ends. This need and the faith 
which satisfies it are admirably set forth in 
the following fines of Edwin Markham, who 
is no more bound by conventional religion 
than is Mr. Wells: 

" Keep heart, O Comrade ! God may be delayed 
By evil, but he suffers no defeat; 
Even as a chance rock in an upland brook 
May change a river's course; and yet no rock, — 
No, nor the baffling mountains of the world, — 
Can hold it from its destiny, the sea e 
God is not foiled; the drift of the world Will 
Is stronger than all wrong. Earth and her years, 
Down joy's bright way, or sorrow's longer road, 
Are moving toward the purpose of the Skies." 1 

The second fundamental objection to 
this doctrine of a finite God is that it re- 

1 Published first in Nautilus. 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 141 

sorts to metaphysical dualism for the ex- 
planation of evil. Mr. Wells is bent upon 
relieving God from all complicity with evil, 
especially with such colossal moral evils as 
this present war, and hence he declares that 
God is finite. But as a consequence he is 
led, as we have seen, to define the ultimate 
reality as a Veiled Being apparently in- 
different to good or evil, and to hypostatize 
the Life Force into a second being, aimlessly 
producing both good and evil. Thus the 
relieving of God from complicity with evil 
is secured through the assumption of cos- 
mic forces quite other than God to which 
it ultimately can be ascribed. 

Now with the motive for this phase of 
Mr. Wells's thought doubtless we all sym- 
pathize, especially so far as it springs from 
the problem of the war. I surmise it to 
have been the experience of many of us to 
feel, as the awful horror of the war grew 
upon us, that the responsibility for it must 
not be assigned to God. The idea that 
it was an inscrutable providence, or that 
it was a special divine judgment, would 
not suffice to make it believable that God 
could be its source. If God must be 
thought of as the cause of the war, we felt 



142 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

that we could not believe in God. But as 
we have tried to think the problem of the 
war through, many of us have felt that it 
also must not be assigned to cosmic forces 
other than God, but that the full responsi- 
bility must be borne by man. It is in fact 
always dangerous to find the explanation 
of moral evil outside of man himself. For 
just so far as that is done the possibility 
of man's eliminating the evil and establish- 
ing the good is diminished. It is only too 
common for both the social philosopher and 
the man of the street to-day to affirm that 
wars will be inevitable for indefinite cen- 
turies to come, and to stigmatize the idea 
of a federal world republic as utterly Uto- 
pian. And the danger of this form of 
unfaith is that it can make itself true, just 
as the opposite doctrines, if held as a posi- 
tive faith, may make themselves true. If 
then the assigning of evils like the war to 
God is fatal to religion, the assigning of 
them in great part to cosmic forces outside 
of man may be fatal to ethics. The modern 
man has too recently freed himself from the 
idea of a kingdom of Satan over against 
the Kingdom of God to find in the doctrine 
of a finite God over against huge semi-evil 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 143 

or aimless cosmic forces an adequate form 
of religious faith. 

These fundamental objections to the 
doctrine of a finite non-cosmic God are in 
themselves enough to show the positive 
value for modern religious experience of that 
conception of God which presents him as the 
immanent controlling force in cosmic evo- 
lution. But at the same time the idea of 
divine immanence gets its significance, in 
turn, chiefly from the kind of God who is 
believed to be immanent. Our preceding 
discussions led us to the conception of God 
as essentially moral creativity, and hence 
it is the morally creative God whose signif- 
icance is enhanced by being recognized as 
the immanent controlling force in cosmic 
evolution. When we are able to find moral 
creativity as the unifying principle through- 
out the whole process of cosmic evolution, 
then we have the final element in that ex- 
perience of being coworkers with an Eter- 
nal Creative Good Will which we have seen 
to be of powerful constructive value for 
modern life. 

Thus the cosmic God to whom our argu- 
ment leads up is not a God who did all his 
thinking at some remote point in the past 



144 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

and who now, like the bureaucratic official, 
has only to put his past thoughts into exe- 
cution; rather is he a God who I5ke the 
prophetic genius of a new democracy, is 
creatively thinking now and whose supreme 
aim is to bring the sons of men to creative 
thinking, in harmony with himself and with 
each other. Nor, again, is the cosmic God 
of our conception a static, sphinx-like God 
whose eternity consists in comprehending 
past and present, good and evil, in one un- 
changing gaze; rather is he a God who is 
living and working in time and who is 
eternal by reason of the inexhaustibleness of 
his creative love. And once more, the cos- 
mic God of our thought is not a great Um- 
pire of the Universe, who has constructed 
the rules of the game of life according to 
his own sovereign will, and who now ad- 
ministers the rules and deals with all viola- 
tions in the spirit of aloofness and strict 
neutrality; on the contrary, he is the great 
Teacher of the Universe, guiding the studies 
and experiments of the school of life ac- 
cording to the living needs of developing 
spirits, and dealing with all their aspirations, 
struggles, and adventurings out into the 
untried and unknown — and likewise with 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 145 

all their blindness, waywardness, passions, 
and sins — with completely self-giving love 
and boundless faith. 

Oik whole interpretation of evolution, 
therefore, rests back upon a characteristic 
type of religious experience — the conscious- 
ness of being coworkers with a morally crea- 
tive God. When faith in God's fatherhood 
and man's sonship, in Jesus as Seer and 
Saviour, in the moral authoritativeness of 
prophet, apostle, and saint, lifts us to a new 
level of insight and power, we rightly judge 
that here if anywhere we are experiencing 
the divine. When the brotherhood of man 
and the Kingdom of God on earth present 
themselves to us as the supremely challeng- 
ing tasks and draw us into the great co- 
operative work for their realization, we are 
impelled to believe that the divine is ex- 
panding in new creative power. When the 
bitterness of class strife and the woe of a 
war-torn world lead us to a new self -dedica- 
tion to social redemption, we instinctively 
feel that the divine reality in its intensest 
and most poignant meaning is drawing us 
into fuller relation to itself. When the 
present experience of eternal values gives 
new substance to the hope of personal and 



146 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

social immortality, we gain a fresh sense 
of the depth and range of divinity in this 
universe. In all these experiences fact and 
value meet and blend both in human ways 
and in ways that reach far beyond the con- 
fines of humanity. Experiences like these, 
we irresistibly feel, are experiences of God. 
They reveal to us the very essence of crea- 
tive power and they bring us into a veritable 
sharing in the creative process. 

Now if we are able to extend the meaning 
of these experiences — speculatively, if you 
will — throughout the entire range of cosmic 
evolution, and find in them the immanent 
controlling force of the whole cosmic proc- 
ess, the experiences themselves gain most 
significantly in richness and power. They 
transcend the realm of merely human as- 
piration and effort as the tragic but tri- 
umphant harmonies of the orchestral sym- 
phony transcend the plaintive melody of 
the folk-song from which their theme is 
taken. And in this very fact, as well as 
in the scientific continuities that we have 
sought to trace, the cosmic interpretation 
of these experiences gains a real verifica- 
tion. 

Pre-eminently now, in the midst of our 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 147 

present world tragedy, must the value of a 
cosmic interpretation of our supreme re- 
ligious experiences be evident. Mr. Wells 
says: "God comes to us neither out of the 
stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a 
still small voice within." x But Kant points 
us to a more adequate working philosophy 
when he testifies: "Two things fill my soul 
with awe: the starry firmament above me 
and the moral law within me." And Paul, 
notwithstanding the limitations of the an- 
tique thought world, attains a yet higher 
spiritual synthesis when he finds God, the 
source of all things, perfectly revealed in 
Jesus Christ and through the triumph of 
Christ's redemptive work becoming liter- 
ally all in all. But Jesus himself expresses 
the same synthesis with unrivalled sim- 
plicity and completeness when he teaches 
that the Power revealed to us in the sun- 
shine and the rain is a Heavenly Father who 
is calling all men into sonship and who is 
seeking through forgiving love to lead them 
all forward together toward the perfect 
life. 

And can we doubt that, for the men in 
the endless zigzag lines of trenches in 

1 Op. cit., p. 18. 



148 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

Europe, and for all who are praying and 
working for a better and more democratic 
world, the revelation of the stars can rein- 
force the revelation of the heart? Here a 
social order all unfinished and in vital 
danger, but there a cosmic order unshake- 
ably established. Here the purposes of 
wisdom and love foiled and thrown back- 
ward by the unexampled outbreak of hatred, 
cruelty, waste, and vice; there unfailing re- 
sources for curative and redemptive work. 
Here exhaustion, pain, and wavering faith; 
there infinite energies for new idealism and 
for endless progress. It is true that when 
men looked to external nature for the main 
evidence for faith in God they were often 
led into the moral indiff erentism of the max- 
im, "It will all be the same in a hundred 
years," and such indiff erentism in a crisis 
like this is equivalent to moral surrender. 
But when men proceed from the God known 
in the heart and in the moral struggles and 
triumphs of history out to the cosmic inter- 
pretation of God they gain perspective for 
a more comprehensive social strategy and 
courage for a longer moral campaign. 
Then they are brought into the full mean- 
ing and power of that religious experience 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 149 

which — whether summoning them to savior- 
hood in times of social catastrophe or to 
constructive endeavor in times of tran- 
quillity — lifts them into the consciousness of 
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative 
Good Will. 

It has been our aim in these discussions 
to recognize the momentousness and the 
hopefulness of the present outreach — blindly 
groping or consciously purposeful — after a 
new religion; and the principle for the right 
appreciation of this outreach we have found 
in the fact that it seems to be the product 
of two convergent tendencies. On the one 
hand there is the demand that any experi- 
ence of God to which men are summoned 
shall be one that is possessed and expressed 
unreservedly in the terms of modern life. 
On the other hand there is the recognition 
that modern life is far from being self- 
sufficient without religion, that it needs 
religion — and more specifically a living ex- 
perience of God — provided these are of such 
a character as to contribute directly toward 
the solution of its central problems. The 
convergence of these two tendencies, we 
have felt, constitutes a direct challenge to 



150 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 

our thinking to do what it can toward giving 
this outreach for a new religion some gen- 
uine satisfaction. 

From this point of view we have been 
discussing three central modern problems: 
the development of personality, the pro- 
motion of social progress, and the inter- 
pretation of cosmic evolution. And the 
result of our discussion has been that we 
have found the new religion which could 
make the largest contribution toward the 
solution of these problems to be — not that 
which centres in a non-purposive Creative 
Force, nor that which is comprised in 
Ethical Culture alone, nor that which offers 
a Finite God beginning to be with man- 
kind — but that which appears in the self- 
renewing power of the Christian religion at 
its best. We have traced this self-renewal 
of Christianity through some of its signifi- 
cant stages and have seen it manifesting 
itself again in our own time wherever men 
are meeting life in the consciousness of 
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative 
Good Will. If the salt does not lose its 
savor — that is, if Christianity does not fail 
to apply to itself that creative moral in- 
telligence demanded everywhere else in the 



AND COSMIC EVOLUTION • 151 

social order — the modern world will not fail 
to find the new religion that it needs and 
will be able to have as the unifying principle 
of its reorganized life a vital experience of 
God. 



INDEX 



Adler, Felix, 59, 79. 

Bergson, H., 121/., 126. 
Bushnell, H., 18/., 35. 

Chamberlain, H. S., 71 /., 74. 
Coe, G. A., 46. 

Democracy, 64 /., 73/., 95 ff. 
Design, the argument from, 

102, 108. 
Determinism, 67. 
Development of personality, 

8-50. 
Dewey, J., 95. 
Drummond, H., 102. 

Ethical Culture, 59/., 77/. 
Ethics, the— 

Of privilege versus the 
ethics of progress, 64- 
82, 89, 106, 128. 
Evil, the problem of, 118 /, 

141/. 
Evolution, cosmic, 101 /. 
Evolutionary theism, 128-132. 
Experience of God, the — 

Its validity, 34-50, 84- 
100, 107-132. 

Faith, 44, 94/., 131/. 
Freedom, 63/., 68/. 

Gladden, W., 20. 
God, experienced in moral 
creativity, 30-34, 145. 

An Eternal Creative Good 
Will, 35 /., 41-50, 63 
/., 81-84, 85-100, 119- 
132, 143/. 



A non-purposive Creative 

Force, 38-50. 
Finite or infinite? 41, 132- 

151. 
Validity of the experience 

of, 34-50, 84-100, 107- 

132. 
As a Father, 57/., 78/. 
Personality of, 40/., 63/. 
Attributes of, 62. 
Postulate of, 85-100. 
As a Central Mind, 117- 

132. 
Limiting conditions for, 

118-132. 
Bergson's idea of, 121-127. 
Immanence of, 143. 
Guyau, J. M., 61. 

Haeckel, E., 67, 74. 
Hobhouse, L. T., 114/. 
Humanity, the cult of, 39 /. 
The ideal of, 72. 

Immanence of God, 143. 
Intelligence, creative, 40 /., 
127. 
Co-operative social, 109- 
111. 
Internationalism, 64, 73, 83, 

99. 
Intuition, 126-127. 

James, W., 40, 42, 45, 68-70, 
76. 

Kant, Immanuel, 86, 91. 
Leuba, James H., 38-50, 127. 



153 



154 



INDEX 



Markham, E., 140. 
Martineau, J., 20-23, 35. 
Mechanism, 114/. 
Mind, a Central, 117-132. 
Mott, J. R., 73, 76. 

Nietzsche, F., 65-67, 74. 

Overstreet, H. A., 57-59, 63, 

77, 79. 

Panpsychism, 80-82. 
Personality, the development 

of, 8-50. 
Postulate, the, of God, 85-100. 
Powers, H. H., 105. 
Progress, social, 51-100. 
Providence, 40. 

Psychology of religion, 5, 38 ff. 
Purposiveness, 109-114. 

Rauschenbusch, W., 52, 66, 75. 
Reality, the sense of, 42, 44, 
45. 



Religion, a new, 1, 49, 149. 
Its paradox, 33, 34. 
As an experience of co- 
working with God, 36- 
50, 63 /., 81-84, 96- 
100, 143-151. 
Ritschl, Albrecht, 23-27, 35. 
Ross, Edward A., 52. 

Salter, W. M., 60, 79. 

Selection, psychic, 113. 

Teleology, 109-114. 
Theism, 41. 

• Evolutionary, 128-132. 
Tolstoi, 27-30, 35. 

Validity of the experience of 
God, 34-50, 84-100, 107-132. 

War, the Great — 

Its relation to faith, 2, 

53-56, 92/., 103/., 141, 

146-149. 
Wells, H. G., 106, 132/. 



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